Sunday, 2 October 2011

இந்திய வெடியுப்பும், பிரிட்டிஷ் சாம்ராஜ்யமும்

The Indian saltpeter trade, the military revolution and the rise of Britain as a global superpower.

INTRODUCTION

BETWEEN 1601 AND 1801, ships made thousands of voyages carrying goods from Asian ports to the primary European markets for East Indian commodities: Amsterdam, London, l'Orient, Copenhagen, Lisbon, and Stockholm. (1) On average, these Indiamen measured 1,000 tons burden, with approximately 2,830 [m.sup.3] of cargo space. (2) Sixteen percent of this cargo space, according to the normal practice of East India captains, consisted of saltpeter--some 452.8 [m.sup.3] of nitrates, weighing 1.6 metric tons. Sometimes, saltpeter was shipped in heavy bags, weighing between 150 and 170 pounds, but usually it was shoveled loose into the bottom of the hold, a marketable ballast that looked like mud and smelled like sewage. Aboard an Indiaman, especially in thesultry atmosphere of tropical waters, the pungent, penetrating odor of saltpeter, buried under tons of coffee and calicoes, was inescapable and euphemistically described, by English sailors, as "the smell of the ship." (3) That unpleasant smell, however, was also the aroma of latent political power.

The persistent high demand of gunpowder mills made saltpeter valuable on the open market, but as a crucial war material its exportationwas politically complicated. Indian rulers and rival merchants oftentried to obstruct the flow of saltpeter, both to manipulate pricing and to deny supplies to their enemies, while European governments sought to coerce and regulate production from afar by fixing prices and requiring minimum annual shipments (4) The East India companies struggled to regularize the volume of saltpeter exports, maximizing production in India but checking distribution in Europe in order to stabilize prices and maintain profitability.

Since the late medieval period, saltpeter had been a concern of governments throughout India, albeit one contracted out to commercial interests and open to foreign traders. The Portuguese entered the inter-Asian saltpeter trade, in a limited way, in the sixteenth century. Indeed, Rene Barendse argues that saltpeter was one of the first Indian Ocean commodities effectively "globalized" by the Estado da India.(5) However, it was the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC)that established the first regular, large-scale exports of saltpeterfrom India to Europe in the second decade of the seventeenth century, soon followed by the Company of London Merchants, precursor to the English East India Company (EIC). Dutch and English interest in nitrates was driven by rising demand all over Europe because of increasinguse of gunpowder and the failure or disruption of Europe's existing sources of saltpeter. These changes were noted first in Amsterdam, already the hub of Europe's largest saltpeter distribution system. Nitrate merchants in Copenhagen and London also encountered the growing inadequacy of Polish saltpeter exports, while the socioeconomic and political difficulties attending the work of domestic "saltpeter men" was a persistent subject of debate and legislation in Early Modern Europe. (6)

After exploring various Indian markets, the VOC and EIC focused their attention on the saltpeter grounds of Bihar, which were accessed through the commercial hub of Patna. Most studies of the saltpeter trade focus on the negotiations and struggles between the European factories at Patna and the Indian middlemen who controlled financing and procurement under the supervision of the Nawab of Bihar's chief merchants. These works, however, ignore the larger context of the saltpeter trade, and, while informative, are narrow in scope. (7) Other studies of the Indian merchants of Bengal, and of Patna in particular, merely touch upon saltpeter, which was not the main or most valuable item of trade in the region. (8) The VOC dominated India's saltpeter export trade well into the eighteenth century, but the militarization ofthe East India Company in the 1750s drastically altered the context of the Bihar nitrate industry. The British takeover of the Subah of Bengal in 1757, the subsequent defeat of a VOC expeditionary force at Bedara in 1759, and the British defeat of the Mughals at Buxar in 1764 secured Company control over Bihar and permitted the monopolizationof the saltpeter trade. (9) The significance of these events cannot be underestimated. By seizing Bengal, the British exerted mastery over 70 percent of the world's saltpeter production during the latter part of the eighteenth century. This figure of 70 percent requires further explanation; statistics, which will be dealt with in the third section of this article, shed light on the essential problems underlying the saltpeter trade. (10)

First of all, however, more should be said of saltpeter itself. Asnoted above, potassium nitrate was the primary ingredient of gunpowder, forming 60-75 percent of the weight of black powder charges. (11)Saltpeter also was employed in industrial processes, ranging from textile bleaching and tanning to soapmaking and metallurgy, and even asa preservative by cheese and sausage makers in Europe. In these and other ancillary capacities, even in embalming and magic, saltpeter had been used since the dawn of civilization, its combustible properties doubtlessly discovered by accident in ancient times. (12) In the Early Modern Age, however, gunpowder making absorbed the lion's share of saltpeter production, with the amounts required for all other uses comparatively miniscule. Apart from its obvious military uses, gunpowder was consumed in large quantities by miners and engineers, huntersand fur traders, slave traders, and by farmers clearing land. (13) Large quantities of gunpowder were taken up by fireworks makers, or were consumed in the diplomatic courtesy of firing salutes, a custom maintained by all European ships and forts. Experience had taught Europeans that gunpowder supplies could be uncertain during wartime. Sincepowder stocks could not be prepared quickly or easily, demand was noless during peaceful interims than during times of war, for, in addition to normal sales for peaceful purposes, gunpowder was steadily purchased or produced to build up military powder reserves for emergency use.

Saltpeter is produced by the decay of organic substances--manure, rotting plant fibres, and even the flesh and bones of dead animals. In nature, the ammonia resulting from the putrefaction and decay of nitrogenous materials is washed into the soil by rainfall, to be oxidized by bacteria, yielding nitrate. In lands combining intense seasonalhumidity with equally intense seasonal aridity, such as India, saltpeter is leached from the ground as sheets of water left by monsoon flooding evaporate. A crust of saltpeter, including mineral salts, spreads across the ground, and can be dug up and refined into pure potassium nitrate. Saltpeter also can be made artificially by extracting the nitrate content of sewage and other refuse, or by preparing nitrate"beds." (14) Both natural and artificial saltpeter, however, requireboiling for long periods at high temperatures. In the Early Modern world, saltpeter could be produced efficiently only under optimal environmental conditions: a hot, humid country with ample firewood, inexpensive labor, and ideally a navigable river to enable producers to ship their product to market cheaply. India, specifically the region ofBihar, was the only place that combined all of these conditions; it also had a highly developed commercial system and a domestic demand for saltpeter sufficient to promote the development of the industry. (15)

Ballistic force, or propulsion, is derived by releasing gases pent-up in particles of saltpeter, the latter being ignited by the combustion of other elements combined with the saltpeter, mainly charcoal and sulfur. These gases expand dramatically, and charges usually are shaped to concentrate and direct the resulting displacement. The ballistic power of saltpeter depends upon the strength of the original chemical bonds that are broken during detonation, which usually are stronger in natural saltpeter than in artificial saltpeter. One reason why China developed fireworks, rockets, and other incendiaries rather than shot-firing artillery was China's reliance on artificial saltpeter for making gunpowder. The Chinese also often used a higher proportion of charcoal and sulfur, which resulted in more fire and less ballistic strength. (16) India, on the other hand, produced saltpeter of very high quality, enabling the development of gunpowder weapons, in particular heavy siege guns, in addition to rockets. In many ways, Indian gunpowder making was more advanced than that of China, particularly regarding the strength of the final product, in its commercial organization, and in its application to military purposes.

THE ORIGINS OF THE INDIAN SALTPETER TRADE

Indian saltpeter was first shipped to Europe by the VOC in 1618, but Dutch traders were hardly pioneering a new industry in either South Asia or Europe. (17) Like all other aspects of the "East India trade," saltpeter production already was a feature of India's internal commerce. Indian knowledge of saltpeter can probably be traced back to Antiquity, when magicians, physicians, priests, and artisans used thesubstance to make naptha. Textile-makers and metallurgists also usedsaltpeter in their trades. It is likely that Mongols introduced the making of fireworks to India in the mid-thirteenth century. We know almost nothing about saltpeter production during this early period, but technical expertise apparently diffused with the adoption of rocketry and eventually artillery by Indian rulers in the fourteenth century. The break-up of the Delhi Sultanate, the rise of regional states, and the growing presence of Turkish mercenaries in India may be linked to the establishment of regular saltpeter production and the adoption and use of gunpowder weapons. (18)

By the fifteenth century, Indian rulers began to acquire significant parks of artillery, and direct references to saltpeter production suddenly surface, especially in Bengal and neighboring Jaunpur, sultanates dominated at the time by Afghan warlords. Two Persian dictionaries of the period, written by court scholars from these regional states, describe saltpeter manufacturing in detail. These references are telling because the area lying between Jaunpur and Bengal eventually emerged as the premiere saltpeter-producing region of India. As earlyas the 1460s, nearly forty years before the commencement of the EastIndia trade, these Persian sources make it clear that the rulers of Jaunpur and Bengal already had organized saltpeter production as state monopolies managed by their chief merchants. (19) A pattern of labor organization, capital investment, and state control was thus in place in eastern India well before the arrival of European traders. In fact, India was roughly a century ahead of Western Europe in terms of developing the infrastructure for gunpowder technology. What is less clear is whether or not saltpeter formed an article of inner-Asian maritime trade before the 1530s. Vengalil A. Janaki suggests that Gujarati saltpeter was shipped from Cambay to Melaka, and then carried onward to Java along with other valued Indian commodities, such as rose water, opium, vermillion, dyes, and iron, but the date of this trade is not clear. (20)

Portuguese involvement in the saltpeter trade in the sixteenth century is not easy to examine, because nitrates were not a regular or major part of the Estado da India's Europe-bound commerce. (21) For instance, a commercial treaty of 1547 between the Portuguese and the rulers of Vijayanagar mentions the exportation of saltpeter from the latter's territory to Goa, but no other details are available. (22) Nevertheless, we can infer a growing Portuguese interest in Indian saltpeter. Portuguese technicians and mercenaries promoted firearms in India, although gunpowder technology was already well known there. However, the procurement of gunpowder by both Indian states and the Portuguese was ad hoc, with soldiers buying their own supplies from local, small-scale manufacturers. It is significant, though, that gunpowder was not shipped to India from Europe in any significant quantities. (23) Sanjay Subrahmanyam asserts that the Portuguese exported saltpeter from Bengal to Goa early on, but does not cite a source for this statement. (24) Similar apparently unsubstantiated statements are made by Anthony R. Disney, George Winius, and Marcus Vink. (25) At Goa, in1510, the Portuguese took over the old Bijapuri arsenal, well stocked with gunpowder, and later constructed an arrastra powder mill to augment the city's shipyards and other military industries. The mill was managed by Indian subcontractors, who employed slave labor, procuring saltpeter from Raibagh. Nitrates were provided there by local contractors under the terms of a commercial treaty with Bijapur, an arrangement continued by the Marathas into the eighteenth century. (26) Asearly as the 1520s, the Portuguese feitoria at Bhatkal had made saltpeter procurement a part of its regular business. (27)

Rene Barendse has brought to light much new information regarding the Portuguese saltpeter trade in a recent magisterial study of the western Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century. By 1617, the Portuguese king had joined the general European clamor for more saltpeter. Tothis end, the Portuguese in India began to explore indigenous markets, notably at the ports of Sind, to which Punjabi saltpeter and piecegoods were carried for export. (28) Another source of supply was Dabhul, where saltpeter was the main item of exchange. However, this town was in decline by the late 1630s due to the breakdown of security in the Maratha Deccan, from which most of the saltpeter was being sent. The Konkani saltpeter trade shifted to the new, more commodious harbor of Rajapur, at the same time moving out of the hands of Adil Shahi nobles and into the grasp of Arab and Iranian financiers; as before, however, saltpeter was an auxiliary commodity alongside piece goods, sailcloth, and raw cotton. The capitalization of the saltpeter trade at Rajapur was in the hands of Saraswat Brahmins, with investors participating from as far away as Goa and Diu. Shivaji (r. 1664-1680) and his successors made nitrate procurement into a state monopoly, thus forcing the Portuguese, their Indian agents, and Banjara peddlers to deal with the Maratha state. (29)

English records of Madras indicate that Portuguese settlers at SanThome traded in saltpeter on a large scale in the 1690s. The disruption of the Deccan routes redirected much of South India's saltpeter trade to the Coromandel Coast. Indian agents operating at Madurai, with subordinates collecting saltpeter in most of the neighboring districts, sent supplies to Pulicat, San Thome, and Madras, to the Danish outpost of Tranquebar, and to the various other Dutch and Portuguese factories along the shoreline of Thanjavur and Ramnad. Here, once again, the saltpeter trade went hand-in-hand with the textile and rice trades. As far back as the 1630s, saltpeter from Madurai had been sent to the minor ports of Tuticorin and Kayalpatnam to be traded, probably by Moplah and Lubbai peddlers, across the Ghats to Malabar and Goa.(30) Antonio Bocarro's Livro das Plantas, describing the period 1633-1635, also mentions saltpeter making its way to Basrur, together with other Coromandel products, such as seed pearls, coral, elephants, rubies, rice, and cotton goods. Private traders and the Rajas of Ikkeri vended these items to Portuguese traders. (31)

As for Bihar and Bengal, Dutch and English reports note the presence of Portuguese traders at Patna in the 1630s, but do not show whether these "unofficial" Portuguese were engaged in the saltpeter trade.Saltpeter, however, was already one of Patna's main articles of trade, and Portuguese "country traders" seized upon it in conjunction with other commodities. (32) Barendse refers to Francisco de Carvalho, amerchant based in Macao, as the Portuguese "monopoly contractor" of the Bengal saltpeter trade in the 1690s. Carvalho was undoubtedly themerchant most favored by the authorities in Goa, but it seems improbable that from the coast of southern China, a single Portuguese trader dominated the private trade in saltpeter from Bengal. It is equallyunlikely that the well-entrenched Indo-Portuguese communities at Hughli, Patna, and elsewhere had not been exporting saltpeter for a longtime. (33)

The Mughal Empire has been styled a "gunpowder empire," which is adebatable characterization. (34) It is clear from Mughal records that guns were important, if only as symbols and occasional instruments of imperial power. The victory of Babur (r. 1526-1530) over Ibrahim Lodi (r. 1517-1526) often is attributed to his use of artillery, however, Babur himself valued his own judgment at least as much as his Turkish guns. (35) After the Battle of Panipat (1526), the first Mughal ruler ordered executions by firing squad, which are some of the firstsuch killings recorded. Contemporary descriptions of Babur's battles, however, emphasize the continuing dominance of cavalry, with guns present but not decisive. Nevertheless, warfare was changing in South Asia. Babur's eldest son and successor, Humayun (r. 1530-1539/1555-1556), was keen to bring Rumi Khan, the Turkish artillery expert employed by the Sultan of Gujarat, over to his side. (36) The widespread use of firearms by Sher Shah (r. 1540-1545) during the brief Sur interregnum is significant, as is the fact that Sher Shah himself was killed by a gunpowder explosion. (37) The early sixteenth century, for India, was a time of significant military change, a watershed between the age of the blade and the age of the gun.

Sher Shah realized that a large army of peasant matchlockmen, recruited and paid by the state, could only exist in the context of a bureaucratic regime with enhanced revenue-collection capabilities and ina kingdom with strong commercial institutions. This lesson was not lost upon Akbar (r. 1556-1605), whose advisor, Abu al-Fazal, adopted many of Sher Shah's innovations. The rising importance of the saltpeter trade, as well as its lowly origins, may be gauged by the meteoric rise of the warlord Hemu, who had opposed Akbar's accession to the throne. Akbar's biographer-courtier, Abu al-Fazl, uncharitably informs us that Hemu was a member of "the Dhusar tribe, which is the lowest class of hucksters in India. At the back lanes he sold saltpetre (nimak-i-shor) with a thousand mortifications ... till at last he became agovernment huckster...." As Akbar's army set out to challenge Hemu, their spirits were roused by a giant image of the saltpeter merchant-turned-general, filled with gunpowder and set on fire. (38) Ironically, Hemu was killed by the Mughals not with a musket shot, but in the old-fashioned style, with an arrow in the eye, followed by a sword blow to the neck.

John F. Richards writes, "[i]n his many battles and campaigns... [Akbar] made effective use of the new gunpowder weaponry--more so thanhis opponents. But gunpowder had become widely available by the mid-sixteenth century. Akbar's string of victories depended upon organizational prowess, not technology." (39) Perhaps the Mughal Empire was a"paper empire" rather than a gunpowder empire, an entity built on effective tax gathering, financial management, and record keeping. Significantly, Sher Shah's infantry, carrying firearms, were recruited from the eastern Ganges Plain, the same region in which saltpeter production had already become an important component of the regional economy. Later, this area provided infantry for the Mughals and eventuallyfor the British, too. (40)

We do not know precisely how Akbar's army acquired gunpowder, but the importance of saltpeter was understood by the Mughals, who demonstrated an interest in the technical aspects of its production and use. Significantly, the saltpeter grounds of Bihar are not mentioned by Abu al-Fazal, although they certainly existed in Akbar's time. The general impression given by the A'in-i Akbari is that possession of firearms and powder manufacturing were decentralized, at least in Akbar's empire. Abu al-Fazal makes it clear that the state controlled only a fraction of the firearms in the empire. We may therefore assume that gunpowder making and saltpeter production had yet to be brought under the purview of imperial officials and agents. Individual soldiers and commanders probably arranged the production of gunpowder as needed in Akbar's day, with the state making intermittent purchases in thebazaars. Indeed, in Sher Shah's time, local officials had been ordered to purchase from the public bazaar at current prices. Some time between the 1580s and the latter years of the reign of Jahangir (1605-1627), the Mughals established control over saltpeter production, justas they had intervened in many other sectors of the economy. (41)

The Dutch and English appeared on the Indian scene after 1600. With their arrival, a much clearer documentation of the saltpeter trade emerges. A lowly village craft, supplying a raw material to petty bazaar traders, was to become the basis for a major, highly strategic international business. The VOC and the Company of Lo ndon Merchants hadcome to India seeking high-value, low-bulk luxury goods, but a few years' experience taught them that a successful stable long-distance trade in Asian luxuries had to be balanced with a local trade between Asian markets, focusing on staple items. The Stuart dynasty in England, furthermore, encouraged the London-based Company to find an alternative source of saltpeter. (42) From Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603), the Stuarts had inherited a royal monopoly on saltpeter and gunpowder procurement. (43) With the rise of gunpowder warfare in Europe, ammunition requirements of armies and navies outstripped European domestic production. Both the English company and the VOC set about solving this problem for their respective governments, inspired partly by patriotism, but also by the lure of profit and potential political influence. (44)

As noted earlier, the Dutch added saltpeter to their shopping listin 1618, three years earlier than the English, partly because the Dutch Republic could not import enough saltpeter from Russia and Polandto meet its rather heavy demands. A network of locally based VOC agents, advised by Indian merchants, quickly identified a convenient source of saltpeter on the central Coromandel Coast between Masulipatam and the Pulicat lagoon. (45) Here, the VOC already had set up tradingfactories, and was participating in a thriving textile trade. As mentioned above, the first shipment of Indian saltpeter to Europe occurred in 1618, and by the late 1620s, saltpeter filled the lower holds of Dutch ships sailing from Masulipatam and Pulicat to Java or Holland. The scale of the trade can be gleaned from the Batavia Dagh-Registers, in which we find the cargo lists of Dutch ships plying the Bay ofBengal. In early 1624, for instance, the Wapen van Rotterdam sailed from the Coromandel carrying 270,000 Dutch ponds, or 135 metric tons of saltpeter. (46) A comparison with the lading of other ships duringthe same period suggests that this was the size of a typical shipment, while some vessels carried nitrates as their main cargo. By the 1630s, the VOC exported 81.5 to 108.7 tons of saltpeter from the Coromandel Coast annually, more than a third as much saltpeter as England produced from domestic sources at this time. (47)

The Company of London Merchants began searching for saltpeter in 1620-1621, initially exporting small amounts from Agra, the imperial capital, where local traders and manufacturers sold considerable quantities of nitrates annually to the Mughal army's contractors. (48) TheEnglish readily adopted the same saltpeter procurement and packing methods used by the Dutch at their Coromandel factories, increasing exports to 335.2 tons a year, enough to ballast their entire Europe-bound fleet. (49) Although the Dutch frequently obstructed English tradeat Agra, the President of the Surat Council, Thomas Kerridge, informed London that expansion of saltpeter procurement was limited only bythe extent of the Company's investment and the availability of shipping. (50) Kerridge's sanguine hopes, however, were premature. Many constraints eventually combined to prevent the English from developing a successful, long-term saltpeter trade from the west coast of India.

Eager to corner the saltpeter market in war-torn Europe, the VOC instructed its Agra factors to disrupt English trade. The English agents were hamstrung by Mughal policy, which reserved for the emperor the right of first purchase at the beginning of each saltpeter production season. Before Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658) invaded Afghanistan in 1629, he ordered 233.8 tons of saltpeter to produce gunpowder for the expedition. This order absorbed most of the available nitrate suppliesat Agra, leaving the English and Dutch to scramble for what remained. A "new" source of saltpeter was discovered at Ahmadabad, closer to Surat, and by the late 1620s, both the English and the VOC had stationed agents there. (51) However, the Mughals required those purchasingsaltpeter to obtain licenses. As the Mughals' chief merchants came to appreciate better the keen foreign interest in nitrates, such licenses became very costly. The overriding intermittent binge purchases of the Mughal court, furthermore, added volatility to a commerce already plagued by extreme seasonal fluctuations in availability, demand, and prices. (52)

The Coromandel saltpeter trade was more profitable than the Surat trade--but not for long. Political difficulties at Masulipatam forcedthe English to establish a new base at Fort Saint George, or Madras,where the nitrate market was already dominated by the Dutch factory at nearby Pulicat, and by the Portuguese of San Thorme. Warfare, drought, and famine ravaged the Coromandel hinterlands, compelling the VOC and the English to turn their attention to Bengal, the most prosperous and politically stable part of India in the mid-seventeenth century. "Unofficial" Portuguese mercenaries and traders had been active in Bengal since the 1530s, and although the Mughals had annexed the area in the late sixteenth century, these "renegades" still held their fortified outpost at Hughli. (53) After sending agents from Agra overland to report on the markets of Bengal, the VOC took advantage of a Mughal effort to drive the Portuguese out of the Ganges delta. In exchange for the assistance of Dutch engineers during the siege of Hughli, the Mughals in 1632 granted the VOC favorable trading conditions in Bengal, including low import-export duties and a license to purchase saltpeter. (54) The Dutch immediately established a factory at Chinsurah, near Hughli, and by 1645 had posted saltpeter agents at Chuprah and Singia, upriver in the heart of the Bihar saltpeter grounds. (55) Between 1641 and 1656, nitrate shipments from the Dutch processingplant at Pippili, near the coast, ranged from 406 to 609 tons annually. In the late 1650s, the refinery facilities were moved to Chinsurah, which centralized saltpeter processing and reduced production costs. (56)

Thanks in part to disruption caused by civil war at home, the English did not establish a regular presence in Bengal until 1652, by which time the VOC was well entrenched. In the aftermath of the civil war, English interlopers flocked to the Indian Ocean, plunging into thesaltpeter export trade. The activities of the interlopers led to an unprecedented collapse of saltpeter prices in Europe even in the faceof wartime demand. Still, the profits of the saltpeter trade were sufficiently high to hold the EIC's interest. The English focused on improving the efficiency of their refineries and their packing and shipping procedures; in 1668, they abandoned the unprofitable Agra and Ahmadabad markets, and in 1670, they closed the refinery at Petapoli onthe Coromandel Coast. A new factory was established at Hughli, and the English soon obtained almost all of their nitrate exports from Patna, the chief commercial city and capital of Bihar. Their order for 1679 alone was 1,318 tons. (57) Only occasionally, when nitrate stocksat Hughli ran low, did the English purchase additional saltpeter at Coromandel ports. (58)

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PATNA SALTPETER TRADE

In order to understand the saltpeter trade that grew up at Patna, we must know something about the organization of nitrate manufacturing in the villages of the "saltpeter mahals"--the districts lying mostly east of Patna, in Bihar, along the Ganges and the lower reaches ofsome of its principal tributaries. The people who collected and processed nitrates were a loosely structured occupational group called nuniyas, closely associated with the bildar "caste," a larger amalgamation of day laborers whose occupation primarily involved earth workingand construction. Nuniyas and bildars, however, did not intermarry, for even bildars considered nuniyas to be "unclean," since their workbrought them into daily contact with ritually polluting substances. Most nuniyas were Hindus, but many had embraced Islam. (59) In 1638, Albert von Mandelslo encountered a group of saltpeter makers somewhere in Gujarat or Rajasthan. (60) His account, along with references tosaltpeter making given in the 'Ain-i Akbari and other texts, suggests that nitrate manufacturing was a traditional, hereditary craft thatdid not change much over time. More detailed studies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on the Bihar region, inform us, however, that there were minor local variations in the use of equipment and terminology. (61)

The nuniyas believed saltpeter to be a by-product of cattle urine and searched for "salt earth" in places where livestock congregated. High-caste peasants, to keep defiling nuniyas away from their homes, permitted them to take their cattle, for a few hours each day, to plots of enclosed, rented ground. From mid-July until September, the nuniyas "impregnated" these plots by ploughing the cattle urine into theground. In October, after the rains, they scraped up the residue that formed on the surface through natural leaching and evaporation. This "brine" was carried to a family-operated furnace, colloquially referred to as a kothi, and boiled to separate the potassium from the nitrates. Nuniyas used a wood-burning kothi and clay pots or troughs, inwhich potassium was leached from the nitrate brine through repeated evaporation. (62) Large, thatched sheds made of bamboo were built where the nuniyas stored salt earth to enable them to continue the refining process throughout the year. Saltpeter production was gritty and labor intensive, each kothi employing an entire family. Adult men prepared and dug the salt earth while women and children collected fuel and tended the fires. A nineteenth-century British observer estimatedthat a typical nuniya family, working for six to nine months betweenthe October and June monsoons, could produce between 634.2 and 1,155kg of raw saltpeter. After further boiling at a refinery operated byone of the European companies, this quantity would be reduced by 40-60 percent, yielding a purified substance called kalmi shora. (63) The VOC usually shipped nitrates that were only 80 or 85 percent "pure," and completed the refining process in the Dutch Republic. (64)

The nuniyas were wretchedly poor, yet their labor required considerable expense. Capital was advanced to them by agents called asamiyas, who were repaid in saltpeter according to the terms of annual contracts. The asamiyas supplied nitrates to Patna-based dadani merchants who controlled the financing of the saltpeter industry. (65) Kumkum Chatterjee has described the structure of the Patna saltpeter trade and the part played by individual merchants and brokers during the period 1733-1757 in detail, enabling us to appreciate how the East India trade was connected to village-level production by Indian intermediaries. (66) Prior to 1750, the dadani merchants worked as subcontractors under the chief merchant of the sarkar, or provincial government. The chief merchant held the "saltpeter farm," which was granted each year--usually to the same person, but not always--by the Nawab of Bihar. Unlike the relatively open, somewhat mobile textile trade, saltpeter production was tightly controlled, with production geographically fixed. Indeed, only a few nuniyas were licensed to produce saltpeter;most were merely licensed to make culinary salt, which entailed onlya slight variation of the same production process. Similarly, only ahandful of dadani merchants and their agents were authorized to buy nitrates. Theoretically, the entire production of the region was brought to Patna, where the chief merchant sold it to an exclusive pool of licensed consumers.

The dadani merchants worked directly with the East India companiesto arrange saltpeter production. Only rarely did a dadani merchant represent more than one company. The asamiyas, meanwhile, signed contracts and posted bonds of up to 1,000 rupees to prevent their accepting bribes from rival companies. (67) European attempts to penetrate this highly organized system to increase or control production failed, as did efforts to introduce competitive marketing. From the 1680s on,Indian merchants at Patna usually stood together, motivated by a common interest. They refused to allow the Europeans to pit them againsteach other in order to drive down saltpeter prices. While it remained strong, the Mughal sarkar supported the dadani merchants, and the chief merchant, through his control of licensing, was able to maintaindiscipline among his underlings through a combination of economic and political threats and coercion. (68)

There is much detailed information regarding the European saltpeter export trade at Patna, only a fraction of which can be discussed here. The late seventeenth century saw another increase in European demand for saltpeter, due in part to changes in warfare in Europe, in particular the expansion of naval power. The steady increase in the volume of European trade with Bengal, especially after 1650, also meant that larger quantities of nitrates were required to ballast Europe-bound ships. (69) The East India companies responded to these incentives by increasing saltpeter orders at Patna. Total demand rose from 1,000 tons in 1658 to 1,750 in 1701. (70) The establishment of permanentfactories in Bengal enabled the Dutch to triple the amount of saltpeter offered for sale in Amsterdam between 1649 and 1654. In the latter year, 151.5 tons of nitrates were sold in Holland, but this represented only a fraction of Bihar's domestic production. Dutch factors, writing to Batavia from Patna in 1688, estimated that 6,142.6 tons of unrefined saltpeter was available in Bihar each year, of which the VOC purchased only 1,046.4 tons, and the Company of London Merchants anadditional 815.4 tons. (71) From 1671 on, the target export figure for the VOC was 1,500 tons of saltpeter, of which 1,375 tons were slated for the Amsterdam market, the remainder for Batavia's gunpowder mill and various Asian markets. (72)

Patna saltpeter also played a role in inter-Asian trade during thelate seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. While Chatterjee suggests that "Mughal" and Armenian commercial agents at Patna were notinterested in saltpeter per se, it nevertheless was a commodity in which they invested, albeit on a more modest scale than the European companies. Scattered documents offer an impression of the inter-Asian saltpeter trade of the seventeenth century. Patna's bazaars were hometo agents representing small groups of merchants from northern and western India, Iran, and Central Asia. Many of the city's prominent Armenian traders were migrants from Isfahan. (73) In 1691-1692, a groupof Armenians shipped 906 tons of saltpeter from Bihar, after they heard that French ships were en route to Bengal to procure a large cargo of nitrates. We do not know the destination of this shipment, but it may well have been Madras, since the English had specifically offered the traders a favorable export duty. (74) Not long afterward, in 1698, an Armenian merchant sailed for Surat from Bengal aboard the Qeddah Merchant, whose cargo included muslins, calicoes, raw silk, opium, iron, sugar, and saltpeter. Like hundreds of other inter-Asian maritime cargoes, this one probably would have slipped into obscurity hadthe ship not fallen prey to the pirate William Kidd, off Malabar. The Indian vessel, taken to Boston as a "French" prize, was described as a ship of four or five hundred tons. (75) In 1706-1707, another English pirate seized a Portuguese "country trade" ship en route from Goa to the Red Sea, also carrying saltpeter. The vessel was found to belong to a group of Turkish merchants and held for ransom, the money being paid by a trader in Dofar. (76) The pattern of this evidence suggests that the Ottomans and Iranians maintained at least a moderate annual supply of Indian saltpeter through private merchants, who imported small quantities of nitrates via the numerous ports of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, in the 1670s and 1680s, some twenty "country" ships traded between Balasore and Hughli and the ports ofSoutheast Asia, although it is unclear whether or not they carried saltpeter. There is in fact some evidence that the Mughal officials inBengal who invested in maritime trade with Southeast Asia withdrew from that branch of commerce around 1690, causing its collapse. (77)

Between 1649 and 1654, the price of saltpeter in Amsterdam jumped from 37 to 66 guilders per quintal (one quintal being equal to 48.95 kg), with the VOC realizing a profit of nearly 1,000 percent. In the 1660s, however, prices tumbled and profits decreased by 275 percent. Such profits were extraordinary by contemporary European standards, but meager in the context of the high-stakes, get-rich-quick East India trade. Whether Europe was at war or at peace had no direct bearing on saltpeter prices in the seventeenth century. Of far greater significance for the saltpeter price were the distribution and marketing strategies of the Dutch and English companies. Both firms had learned, by the end of the 1600s, to limit production and hoard supplies to create a permanent, artificial nitrate shortage, thus maintaining an acceptable profit margin. (78) At a time of commercial and military rivalry between England and Holland, the Company of London Merchants andthe VOC also sabotaged each other politically at the court of the Nawab of Bihar whenever an opportunity presented itself. (79) Even in the eighteenth century, the VOC sold nitrate in Europe at a 200 percent profit, annually grossing some 550,000 guilders, even though, like the EIC, it was required to provide stipulated amounts of saltpeter to the home government. (80)

At Patna, despite generally favorable economic conditions, European traders often encountered obstacles, both natural and man-made. Thecountryside of Bihar was prone to drought and flooding, which suspended saltpeter production for months on end. Patna, a ramshackle city built of mud bricks, bamboo, and thatch, suffered from frequent firesand--with the break-up of the Mughal Empire--from marauding armies and political instability. In the early eighteenth century, the nawabsof Bihar demanded nazars from the European merchants, gifts that theVOC promptly paid. The English, less well financed, were forced to leave Patna and suspend trading until the nawab, sorely missing the revenues derived from their business, lured them back with hollow promises of better treatment. In 1702, the Company of London Merchants andthe newly established, rival East India Company were united by the Crown, under the name of the latter entity, but local Mughal officialscontinued, for many years, to demand a double peshkash (tribute) from the English. (81) When Murshid Quli Khan took over as Nawab (1706) and later as Subahdar of Bengal (1717), the overall political contextof the saltpeter trade gradually improved and stabilized, but at Patna the local nawab and his merchants continued to pose problems, especially for the English. Rumors often drove up saltpeter prices. Speculation that the Mughals might heed an Ottoman plea to cut off the supply of saltpeter to "Christian powers" roughly doubled nitrate pricesat Patna. And once the prices rose, they did not fall again even after the rumors died away. (82)

As if harassment and manipulation were not bad enough, the Dutch and English had to worry about river pirates, zamindars (landlords), and even sarkar officials attacking the saltpeter barges sent down to the coast when the Ganges and Hughli were running high. These barges,called patellas, carried between 150 and 200 tons of nitrates, and thus the loss of even one of them could seriously diminish annual export totals. (83) The Nawab's troops offered no protection, even thoughthey were paid to provide security. European soldiers had to be sentup-river from Chinsurah and Calcutta to escort the seasonal flotillas past the most notorious dacoits' lairs. (84) The English soon were overwhelmed: They closed their Patna factory in 1715 and farmed its trade out to Indian subcontractors. (85) This was disastrous, since local agents could procure goods, but did not appreciate the need to ship stocks rapidly to Calcutta in time to be loaded aboard Europe-bound fleets, whose intricate long-distance sailing schedule was determined by the turning of the monsoon and by the weather off the Cape of Good Hope. Local agents also did not understand the refining and packing requirements necessary to prepare saltpeter for sale in Europe. Bythe time the English returned to Patna in 1718, after much wranglingand bribery, their share of the saltpeter trade had been appropriated by their former agent, Janarddan Seth, and a consortium of Muslim and Armenian merchants. Fortunately for the English, the nawab revokedJanarddan Seth's farman granting him the Company's share of the saltpeter trade. It was another instance of how the nawab liked to keep all of the Patna merchants on their toes and remind them, from time totime, who the ultimate authority was. (86) From 1717 on, thanks to agenerous farman from the Mughal emperor, the English at least in theory enjoyed the same privileges long held by the VOC.

When one examines the records of the Patna saltpeter trade year byyear during the first half of the eighteenth century, the constant uncertainty regarding procurement and pricing stands out. Efforts werecontinuously made by all parties to maximize profits without sacrificing market stability. In this balancing act, the VOC was the most adept of the European companies, because of its standing policy requiring its agents in Bengal to meet a fixed export quota. The other companies struggled to obtain as much saltpeter as possible, and in the case of the English, we see that their shipments, unlike those of the VOC, often fluctuated wildly from year to year. Their goal was to shipas much as possible, at all times, in order to build up stockpiles, in Calcutta and also at Madras, to see the Company through times of dearth. (87)

In the 1720s and 1730s, the Patna saltpeter trade entered a new phase with the arrival of the Compagnie des Indes (the French East India Company). This phase coincided with a dramatic, steady, long-term increase in European trade with Bengal in all respects, in the varietyof goods being traded, in tonnage, and in value. During a local political crisis (1731-1732), Joseph Francois Dupleix, the French factor,rallied the other European agents and established a single, shared saltpeter monopoly. A tripartite treaty signed in 1736 enabled the French, Dutch, and English to enjoy fixed proportions of all saltpeter purchased by the asamiyas, who were placed under joint control; the treaty excluded Danish, Swedish, and Austrian merchants altogether and was, in part, an effort to protect the interests of the original EastIndia companies. (88) The VOC, however, sabotaged Dupleix's system by monopolizing the shipping needed to carry saltpeter to the coast, thus increasing their market share from 978.4 to 1,630.8 tons annually. As a result of this opportunistic move, the VOC dominated the saltpeter trade through the 1740s, despite English and French efforts to turn the nawab against them. (89)

When Alivardi Khan (r. 1740-1756) became Subahdar of Bengal, he curbed the influence of foreign merchants, especially at Patna, seekingto prevent the violent rivalry that had brought the disaster of civil war and European military intervention to South India. He also hoped to avoid provoking the aggressive measures the Dutch had undertakenin Malabar in an effort to control the pepper trade. To this end, Alivardi Khan farmed the commodity and goods trades of Bengal out to Indian merchants as limited-term monopolies, allowing them to dictate terms to the European companies. In the case of the saltpeter trade, Amir Chand obtained the monopoly, while his brother, Deep Chand, was appointed faujdar of the district of Syrang, with full military and judicial control over the heart of the "saltpeter mahals." Under these conditions, the English East India Company's debt to the Chand brothers increased to 1.6 million rupees by 1750. For the next seven years,until the Battle of Plassey, the saltpeter monopoly was held either by the Chand brothers or by Khwajah Wajid, an Armenian from Iran who was the Subahdar's chief broker. (90) Khwajah Wajid also happened to be the chief broker for the Compagnie des Indes, and consequently no friend of the English, with whom he often quarreled. (91)

The English share of the saltpeter trade in the 1750s was 51,000 mans, or 2,238 tons annually, but the situation changed dramatically due to the British takeover of Bengal after the Battle of Plassey in 1757. (92) During the political intrigues that enabled the British to defeat Suraj-ud-Daula (r. 1756-1757), Colonel Robert Clive underminedthe Chand brothers by drafting false treaties and making secret agreements with an influential nobleman, Mir Jafar (r. 1757-1760). (93) After seizing power, Mir Jafar soon found a pretext for granting the East India Company a perpetual monopoly over all saltpeter production in the Subah of Bengal. (94) The British takeover also had included an assault on the French factory at Chandernagore, which removed the Compagnie des Indes from play. Khwajah Wajid, now Mir Jafar's chief merchant, feared the worst and conspired with the VOC to bring troops to Bengal to protect their common interests. This force was defeated by the East India Company's army, shortly after its arrival, in an ambush at Bedara in 1759. Thanks to this fiasco, almost all saltpeter shipped from India to Europe during the period 1758-1763 was carried inBritish ships, an unexpected turn that had a dramatic impact on the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). Only after the signing of the Treaty ofParis were the French and Dutch allowed to buy saltpeter again, and then only in quantities stipulated by the East India Company. These trading rights could be revoked during wartime, as occurred when the French and Dutch intervened in the American Revolution. In short, Britain quietly had secured unassailable control over the world's most important source of saltpeter. (95)

THE SALTPETER MONOPOLY, THE MILITARY REVOLUTION, AND THE BALANCE OF POWER

The establishment of the EIC's saltpeter monopoly changed every aspect of nitrate production and marketing. The namak-sayar, or assessment of each kothi, was collected by the commercial resident at Patna rather than by the holder of the saltpeter farm. The dadani merchantsand asamiyas operated as middlemen, but terms were dictated to them by the Board of Trade, which carried out policies set by the Bengal Council and the Court of Directors of the Company in London. (96) Monopolization of the saltpeter trade, however, did not end the EIC's problems. In 1763, war broke out again in Bengal. The Patna factory was overrun, and the saltpeter trade halted until after the British triumph at the Battle of Buxar in 1764. In the wake of this conflict, the EIC's finances were in such disarray that almost all trade in Bihar was suspended temporarily. (97)

Despite the drought-induced famine of 1769-1770, which was exacerbated by the Company's tax-farming schemes, the saltpeter trade thrived. Sayyid Ghulam Hussain Khan, a Muslim chronicler of Bengal during this period, wrote, "were it not for the purchases of saltpeter, opium, raw silk, and white piece-goods which the English make yearly throughout Bengal and [Bihar], probably a rupee ... would have become in most hands as scarce as the Philosopher's Stone." (98) Even the VOC was able to ship 1,250 tons of nitrates from Patna aboard six ships, ofwhich three were bound directly for Holland and three for Batavia. By the late 1770s, the Dutch were importing roughly 40 tons of gold into Bengal annually to finance their trade; one of the chief articles they sought was saltpeter, on which the VOC earned a profit of between 15 and 20 percent after covering all expenses, including shipping costs. (99) The British monopoly scarcely curtailed Dutch trade, but the strategic aim of British control of the saltpeter industry was notto starve the other European powers; it rather tried to generate revenue and promote complete dependency on Indian saltpeter. For its part, between 1755 and 1774, the VOC paid much of its pledge of 1.2 million florins to the Dutch government in saltpeter. Saltpeter might notbe yielding the 200 percent profits realized in better days, but it remained an important element of the VOC's overall operations. (100)

Initially, in the 1760s, the British allowed their Indian allies to produce saltpeter in amounts fixed by agreements with the Company. The Raja of Banaras, for instance, was permitted to manufacture 175.7tons annually for indigenous consumption. However, Company efforts to impose both a saltpeter and a salt monopoly within India led inevitably to repressive measures. Indian rulers were encouraged to close down saltpeter kothis and accept an annual provision of nitrate supplies. (101) Nuniyas who produced saltpeter without a license from the Company, or who sold to private agents, were treated as smugglers. By the 1790s, most nuniyas in territories controlled either directly or indirectly by the British had been put out of business, forced to operate clandestinely, or had gone to work for the East India Company. (102) During the early nineteenth century, this monopolization of India's internal saltpeter trade played a major role in the demilitarization of South Asia, preparatory to the imposition of full-blown colonial rule. Even Tipu Sultan (r. 1782-1799), one of the most self-sufficient of Early Modern India's rulers, had difficulty supplying his troops. In 1799, when the Mysorean fort of Sadashivagarh in Kanara fell into British hands, it was found to contain among its ammunition 100,000 musket balls, but only enough gunpowder to use a quarter of them,and no saltpeter reserves. Compared with other Indian forts of the period, this outpost could be considered rather well supplied, although the average Company infantry battalion, at the time, carried more ammunition in its cartridge boxes and expense pouches. (103)

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the era of the European Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), the saltpeter monopoly became a burden for the East India Company, while concomitantly it became a tool of international politics used to stunning effect by the British Government. (104) The Company's profit derived from saltpeter ranged from 14,262 [pounds sterling] to 26,146 [pounds sterling] during the period 1772-1779, but profits bore little relationship to total sales; during most years, to the dismay of the Directors, the saltpeter trade posted a net loss. (105) Indeed, the "hidden" losses of the saltpeter monopoly were targeted by Edmund Burke in parliamentary debates of the time, which give us an indication of how well contemporary Britons understood the larger significance of the trade. (106) Production was curtailed as much as possible during the period from 1780 to 1793 in order to stave off a collapse of saltpeterprices. Between the end of the Seven Years' War and the outbreak of the War of the First Coalition in 1793, the price of saltpeter in Europe fell by 50 percent. Only by exploiting a new market for Indian saltpeter, that of China, could the Company cover the losses sustained trying to supply British gunpowder mills. (107) In order to assure that the Company remained in the saltpeter trade, the Crown required itto sell a stipulated amount of saltpeter in England every year at fixed rates. Occasionally, if production faltered in Bihar, the Bengal authorities permitted individuals to import saltpeter to Calcutta from other parts of India, usually from Awadh. (108) In Awadh, the British Resident, for a short time, established his own saltpeter monopolyand made a fortune supplying nitrates to the Company. (109) The factthat many British gunpowder mills were operated by influential members of the Court of Directors and Court of Proprietors meant that the gunpowder industry in Britain played a role in shaping Company policies. Simply put, there was little political or economic interest in driving up the price of saltpeter. (110)

To understand the significance of the British saltpeter monopoly and its effect on the fate of nations, we must revisit the "Military Revolution" thesis promulgated by Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker.(111) Roberts and Parker argue that the introduction of gunpowder warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries increased the cost of armed conflict, enabling states to monopolize military force, sinceonly the resources of a state could pay for the new weapons or meet their logistical requirements. Other elements of this thesis have been developed and fine-tuned by a number of scholars, including the role played by trace italienne fortifications, larger standing armies, growing state bureaucracies, and the global projection of European military power, but for our purposes the central issue is the timing of the Military Revolution. Generally, the turning point of the revolution and the great augmentation of European strength is situated in theseventeenth century. Yet for all of their talk about the tactics of the Dutch stadtholders Maurice of Orange-Nassau (1567-1625) and Willem Lodewijk of Nassau (1560-1620), gunpowder, artillery, ships armed with guns, and forts designed to endure bombardment, the Military Revolution scholars have said very little about gunpowder production or saltpeter, the basic necessary ingredient of gunpowder. To put it bluntly, the Military Revolution thesis privileged economic constraints at the level of state finance to the extent that it has largely ignored the level of secondary commercial financing and the tedious, inglorious procurement of raw materials.

Patna emerged as the world's largest and most important affordablesaltpeter market in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a featrequiring explanation, for India was not the only place in the worldwhere saltpeter was produced. In the 1770s, European ships were carrying away some 4,500 tons of Indian nitrates annually, 90 percent of which passed through Calcutta. Indian domestic production during the same period was probably at least half again as much, or approximately 6,750 tons. The world beyond India, during the late eighteenth century, managed to increase production from an estimated 2,800 tons to 4,500 tons by the end of the 1780s, much of this increase occurring inFrance. Thus, in the 1770s, Indian saltpeter production represented 70 percent of total world supplies; as non-Indian sources of saltpeter increased, this ratio did not change because nitrate exports from India more than doubled. If anything, just in terms of sheer volume, the significance of the Indian saltpeter trade increased perhaps threefold in the 1790s.

In considering non-Indian sources of saltpeter, one thinks immediately of China, the birthplace of gunpowder. Saltpeter grounds were found in half of China's provinces, but usually, the nitrates were usedfor fertilizer, not for making gunpowder. In the seventeenth century, most of the country's nitrate beds were found in Shansi, Szechuan, and Shantung: Saltpeter manufacturing and distribution were an imperial monopoly, and participation in the trade required expensive licenses. (112) Even so, small amounts of nitrates were exported from the ports of southern China. Quite a lot of these exports were bound for Siam, a major re-export point (much like Hamburg, in Europe) for saltpeter, and carried from there to numerous far-off destinations, including Japan, then in the midst of its own gunpowder-driven Military Revolution. (113) Chinese exportation of saltpeter ceased by imperial decree in 1515, and even the Portuguese powder mill at Macao was compelled to send to India for raw materials. (114) The Ming embargo affected all of Southeast Asia, but especially the Philippines, to which twenty Chinese junks a year were sailing in the late sixteenth century,some carrying saltpeter as part of their cargo. (115) Manila was supposed to receive gunpowder supplies from Mexico via the trans-Pacificgalleon, but in reality, the Spanish garrisons in the Philippines had to rely on Chinese gunpowder, or on intermittent shipments from Macao. The Ming blockade and the temporary union of Portugal and Spain led to a reliance on saltpeter imports from India, but by the 1620s, officials in Manila were complaining that such supplies were unreliable and expensive. (116)

In Vietnam and Cambodia, saltpeter formed naturally in an environment almost identical to that of Bihar. Chinese immigrants in Southeast Asia were well acquainted with saltpeter preparation and gunpowder manufacturing, but trade networks along the Mekong were not developedenough to make these sources of supply commercially or militarily significant. (117) According to Tome Pires, writing a few years prior to the Ming embargo on saltpeter exports, firearms and fireworks of all kinds had been quite prevalent and frequently used in Dai Viet, butmost of the saltpeter was imported from China, while the sulfur usedto make gunpowder was brought from the Solor Islands. Apparently, the Vietnamese found it cheaper or easier to import the ingredients of gunpowder than to produce explosives with local resources. (118) In 1752, the VOC tried with little success to break into the Cochin Chinamarket; they found that domestic saltpeter manufacturing, which had come into being by this time, had been declared a royal monopoly. (119) The impact of the decline in VOC nitrate shipments from India may be seen clearly in the sudden reappearance of Chinese saltpeter exports. By the 1780s, European private traders were carrying shipments ofup to 184.5 tons at a time from China to the ports of Penang and Melaka, presumably for distribution to Southeast Asian markets. (120) Wehave no way of knowing what the total saltpeter production of East and Southeast Asia may have been in the eighteenth century, but the figures above, combined with the fact that China itself became a marketfor Indian saltpeter, all suggest that domestic output cannot have been more than approximately 1,000 tons, an amount roughly equal to two-thirds of European production at that time.

Natural saltpeter had been used in Iran to make gunpowder, possibly even before the Safavid dynasty ascended to power in 1501, but production levels were adequate only for internal consumption. As we haveseen, groups of Iranian and Armenian merchants had agents in Patna, sending intermittent shipments to the Persian Gulf. (121) The OttomanEmpire, like Safavid Iran, one of the original Early Modern "Gunpowder Empires," produced only meager amounts of saltpeter for its size, purchasing much of its gunpowder from the English and Dutch, as did the Berbers of North Africa. (122) Recent research on Ottoman saltpeter and gunpowder manufacturing suggests that Turkish production, drawnmainly from the Balkans, was in decline in the second half of the eighteenth century. Annual gunpowder production was only 169 tons, fromwhich we may infer that saltpeter output had fallen to approximately126 tons. (123) Saltpeter and gunpowder were also produced in Egypt in the eighteenth century, in the suburbs of Cairo. Total output of gunpowder, according to French observers in 1798, was around 82.4 tons, sold in relatively small batches to the various beys, as well as totrans-Saharan caravans, Syrian merchants, and Arabian tribes. However, 61.8 tons of saltpeter were sent to Genoa, in Italy, being sold very cheaply in Cairo. (124) Egyptian saltpeter production thus was around 123 tons, which, combined with the Iranian and Ottoman evidence, suggests perhaps a total annual Middle Eastern output of 300 tons.

In Europe, meanwhile, saltpeter production in Hungary, southern Italy, and eastern Spain was hampered by labor shortages, lack of fuel,high transportation costs, and poorly developed commercial institutions. (125) There was, however, a heavy demand for saltpeter and gunpowder in the Early Modern Mediterranean region. As early as 1476, Milan's inventory of military stores included 85.8 tons of gunpowder, andin the early sixteenth century, a German traveler had noted twelve gunpowder mills inside the Venetian arsenal, with a great supply of saltpeter on hand. (126) In 1629, the Dutch merchant Cornelis Leideckerreceived permission from the States-General to ship 25 tons of saltpeter to Venice. (127) Spain's efforts to build an integrated, efficient colonial saltpeter production system in Mexico failed, meanwhile, due to ecological and institutional constraints. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why Spain lagged behind in the international arms raceof the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (128) An indigenous Spanish saltpeter industry was developed, taking advantage of Spain's semi-arid climate, but because of high costs of production, the state had to raise prohibitive barriers against imported saltpeter. (129) Saltpeter was also available at the Cape Verdian Islands, which were a Portuguese colony, but not in commercially significant quantities. (130) Portugal imported nitrates from India, of course, and maintained gunpowder mills at Goa, in Brazil, and outside Lisbon. Average annualPortuguese gunpowder production in the late eighteenth century, however, was only 299.6 tons. (131) In France, the old saltpeter works ofLorraine had been worked out by the eighteenth century, forcing producers to use nitrate beds similar to those used in Spain and Sweden to make artificial saltpeter. (132) Like Portugal, France also was dependent on Indian nitrates, and therefore it is difficult to estimate domestic production prior to the efforts of Turgot and Lavoisier to establish a domestic French saltpeter industry. However, during the Seven Years' War, when nitrate shipments had been halted by the Britishseizure of Bengal, France fell back on the traditional European methods of collecting and refining saltpeter, the result being an output of 761 tons, which had cost a staggering 600,000 livres (45,000 [pounds sterling]) to procure. During this same period, French gunpowder production was 724.8 tons, about half of the country's perceived requirements in the 1750s. (133)

"Northern" Europe's most frequently mentioned natural saltpeter ground was in eastern Poland. Since the sixteenth century, small quantities of nitrates had been produced and exported overland to Transylvania and Germany, or via the port of Danzig to Western Europe. (134) In the records of the States-General of Holland, stray references to the activities of Dutch traders and diplomats shed light on the Early Modern Polish saltpeter trade. Joost Willemsz, an Amsterdam merchant,was a major figure in the Danzig saltpeter trade in the early seventeenth century, able to purchase 100 tons of nitrates at a time. Obtaining saltpeter through Danzig, however, was not easy. (135) Dutch merchants had to obtain permission from their own government before purchasing Polish saltpeter, and were advised to buy from the state rather than private traders. The King of Poland demanded high export duties, while the Danes, who imported in some years more than 250 tons of saltpeter from Poland, mostly for re-export, levied steep tolls on all cargoes of nitrates passing out of the Baltic. Sweden and Russia, meanwhile, might determine whether or not foreign powers could have access to "Danzig" saltpeter. (136) There were also sometimes complaints by Dutch gunpowder mills about the quality of Polish saltpeter. (137) In 1771, the saltpeter grounds of Poland, located around Brody, Zolkiew, and Przeworsk, exported only 35 tons of nitrates from Danzig. It is quite possible, however, that even more saltpeter was being traded in small quantities by the Jewish traders who became prominent atevery level of the Polish saltpeter trade in the 1760s. These traders forwarded consignments to Cracow, and thence to Danzig or to Wroclaw, from which nitrates were exported to Germany, with Leipzig's Jewish mercantile community being an important hub of the saltpeter business. (138) The Podolia saltpeter-producing area was annexed and divided in the first partitioning of Poland (1772), and the main saltpeter mine was "appropriated" by the Austrians, much to the annoyance of neighboring Prussia. (139) Other small saltpeter "mines" existed elsewhere in Austria, as well as in Bavaria, Silesia, and Lower Saxony. (140) The "saltpeter mines" of Bohemia and Anhalt, in Upper Saxony, cannot have been large either, but probably were sufficient to supply a few small local gunpowder works. (141) A German scholar in the late eighteenth century carefully noted the abortive efforts that had been made to produce artificial saltpeter in the various German principalities since the Middle Ages; he noted as well that by the 1790s, almostall of the German states had given up: Indian saltpeter imported from England and Holland was three times cheaper, much more abundant, and of better quality. (142)

Russia lay on the fringes of both European and Asian trade networks, but Central Asian caravan routes carried Chinese, Indian, and Iranian goods to Moscow and onward as far as Lvov, in southeastern Poland. Small quantities of saltpeter formed part of this peddler's trade. (143) In sixteenth- and seventeenth century Russia, Cossack frontier guards were often paid in vodka and saltpeter. (144) Fearful of expansionist Catholic Poland, the Czar "donated" 50 tons of nitrates to the Dutch Republic in 1609, the saltpeter being shipped from Archangel.(145) Unfortunately, we know little more about Early Modern Russian saltpeter production than that it was fairly modest, albeit capable of expansion. The main Russian saltpeter works in the eighteenth century were situated far from its European harbors: There existed a largestate-managed factory near the Volga mouth, north of Astrakhan, at the site of the old campground of the Golden Horde, and numerous private saltpeter works scattered across the Ukraine. From these works, Russia obtained enough saltpeter to supply several gunpowder mills, both crown-owned and private, in addition to amassing 319.3 tons of potassium nitrate for exportation. (146)

The major powers of Europe, the centers of the Military Revolution, lacked significant natural saltpeter grounds. One is hardly surprised to note that France, Austria, Prussia, Sweden, Holland, and England attempted, at one time or another, to gain a share of the Bihar saltpeter trade. (147) Most continental powers, in fact, relied on elaborate schemes to supply their gunpowder mills with artificially produced nitrates. (148) Detailed research regarding Swedish nitrate procurement reveals why states found it easier to import saltpeter from India, or purchase it from England, Holland, Denmark, or Russia rather than develop a domestic nitrate industry. (149) Sweden's domestic artificial nitrate industry turned out 255 tons of saltpeter annually by 1783; this was a well-regulated system, albeit one run at enormous cost. (150) Not only in Sweden, but everywhere in Western Europe, landlords and peasants alike resisted royal saltpeter collectors, who wereseen as little more than licensed thieves seizing people's fertilizer. In most parts of Europe, furthermore, deforestation and rising fuel costs made saltpeter refining prohibitively expensive. Importing saltpeter posed security risks, but trying to produce nitrates artificially at home had negative political and economic consequences that noEarly Modern state could ignore. (151) If one generously assumes that total Russian saltpeter production was triple the output of the Astrakhan factory (to account for domestic use and the many small saltpeter works scattered across the Ukraine), it yielded a total of approximately 958 tons. Prior to the reorganization of saltpeter making in France, total European output of nitrates probably was therefore no more than 1,500 tons annually; and this was produced at the expense ofvaluable manure, and at three times the cost of Indian saltpeter even after factoring in the cost of exportation.

How much gunpowder was Europe consuming in the eighteenth century?Fortunately, demand can be estimated better than saltpeter production. We have already noted that France needed at least 1,500 tons of gunpowder annually, although actual procurement never matched demand. The British Ordinance Office, accounting for every barrel of gunpowderin the British Empire, provides detailed records for this politically sensitive article of trade. During the War of the Austrian Succession (1744-1748), 613.9 tons of "passed proof" gunpowder, three-fourthsof which consisted of Indian saltpeter, were provided to the Crown. In the Seven Years' War, gunpowder consumption rose to 656.5 tons annually, 90 percent of which was newly milled powder rather than reworked stock, which suggests that an enormous amount of old, stored powder also was being used. In 1754, the American colonies alone consumed 240.4 tons, a rate that doubled normal peacetime consumption. (152)

Prior to the 1760s, warfare did not entail a significant increase in gunpowder orders, since much of the powder used in combat came from prewar stockpiles. Furthermore, a lot of powder was used in other contexts, such as mining, hunting, the firing of salutes by ships, furtrading, and slave trading. Even in a peaceful year, the British Empire used 906 tons of gunpowder. However, each year, the East India Company exported enough saltpeter from India to manufacture 3,624 tons.The balance either was stockpiled in British arsenals or re-exportedto Europe, usually to Hamburg, which received considerable quantities of saltpeter as well. (153) To these figures must be added stocks supplied by the Dutch and Danish. Copenhagen, which had already been amarket for Polish nitrates, also became a major market for Indian saltpeter, even if Denmark tended to remain neutral in the wars of the late eighteenth century. (154) European states preferred to keep a few mills producing powder steadily, even during peacetime, rather thanwaiting to mobilize powder production after the declaration of war, when access to raw materials might well be cut off. The powder industry required careful management and the frequent inspection of stockpiled materials to assure their proper storage and distribution and to verify the quality of corned powder, which was apt to decay over time.

The Seven Years' War was the first European conflict influenced bygunpowder and Indian saltpeter re-exports from Britain. In 1746, Prussia's ten mills turned out 202.9 tons of gunpowder, while by the time of the Seven Years' War, annual production had increased only to 253.6 tons. Frederick the Great (r. 1740-1786), facing the combined strength of France, Austria, and Russia with an army of only 40,000 men,adopted firepower-intensive tactics, and during the course of the war, Prussian expenditure of gunpowder totaled an astonishing 37,146 tons. Most of this powder was purchased from Britain and Holland at a cost that crippled Prussia's economy for decades to come. (155) While European military theorists had been intrigued by the possibilities of firepower since the fifteenth century, it was only in the mid-eighteenth century that tactical innovations were matched by improvements in military technology and the development of better financial and logistical systems. In the wake of the Seven Years' War, Britain in particular developed new tactics and maneuvers, both military and naval,that maximized firepower, secure in the knowledge that Britain's control of the Indian saltpeter trade and her large metallurgical industries could provide the country with an almost unlimited ammunition supply.

Effective gunpowder warfare requires ammunition. This seemingly obvious point is overlooked by many military historians, who often assume that armies always have unlimited amounts of gunpowder at their disposal. In fact, Early Modern European arsenals contained too much shot and not enough powder. This was partly because it was better to make up gunpowder as needed, assuring a fresh, high-quality charge, butthe main reason for the shortage of powder was the dearth of saltpeter. Since the preparation of artificial saltpeter in nitrate beds required an entire year, it was not a raw material that could be organized on the fly. Every major European state capable of doing so tried to stockpile saltpeter between conflicts. In 1775, the French Crown tried to remedy its nitrate shortage. (156) Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot insisted that science could improve upon nature by discovering a way to produce high-quality artificial saltpeter. To this end, forced saltpeter collections were abolished and a domestic market for "salt earth" fostered. A hefty cash reward and a lucrative government assignment was offered to anyone who could devise an efficient way of processing artificial saltpeter. Given the advances that had been made in chemistry between 1750 and 1775, especially by French scholars, such hopes were reasonable. European scientists were better informed, by the1770s, about the behavior of combinations of elements, and also about gases. Turgot's contest was won by Antoine Lavoisier, whose treatise earned him the directorship of the royal power works at Essone. (157) French production of saltpeter increased from 881.1 tons in 1776 to 1,272.7 tons in 1784. (158) Lavoisier's most promising apprentice at Essone, Eleuthere Irenee du Pont de Nemours, eventually fled to theUnited States in 1799, there to found the largest powder mill in theAmericas. In their adopted country, the Duponts continued to try to break the British saltpeter monopoly, an effort in which they experienced mixed success. (159) Artificial nitrate production in France hadrisen to 1,812 tons by 1788; the Essone arsenal had achieved an output of 90.6 tons of gunpowder, and the national stockpile of gunpowderwas 2,265 tons, approximately enough to sustain the armed forces fortwo years. Even more significant, however, was the fact that manufacturing its own nitrates had saved France some 21,000,000 [pounds sterling]. As for Lavoisier, by the time of his death, he was credited with "quintupling" French nitrate production, thus "delivering us from the tribute paid to England for the saltpetre of Asia." (160) Even so, on the eve of the Napoleonic Wars, France still imported several shiploads of saltpeter from India each year, especially for the manufacture of high-quality artillery powder. (161)

Before the end of the seventeenth century, gunpowder was usually handled in serpentine form, without the aid of paper or cloth cartridges: Measurements were haphazard and rates of fire slow. The introduction of cartridges on the eve of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) enabled armies to load weapons rapidly and concentrate on shortening the interval between volleys and salvoes. The substitution of ring bayonets for plug bayonets also increased infantry firepower. At the Battle of Malplaquet in 1709, it was thought that most of the 25,000-30,000 casualties suffered were inflicted by firearms. (162) At roughly the same time, newly established and royally sponsored scientific societies conducted ballistic experiments that improved gunners' understanding of how gunpowder produced propulsion. (163) One result of such trials, which continued throughout the eighteenth century,was that artillery officers found ways to make powder stocks go further. In 1747, the Dutch developed a boring technique for artillery tubes that increased the ballistic force of small powder charges. This innovation cannot be overemphasized. Overnight, European armies doubled, and in some cases even quadrupled, the effectiveness of gunpowderstocks. These incremental improvements in weaponry converged around the time of the Seven Years' War, and the resulting increase in firepower caused the horrific slaughter experienced on the battlefields ofthat conflict, for which none of the combatants was prepared. (164)

We can trace the shift in European warfare during the eighteenth century in a number of ways. One telling change was that the significance of a victory, once reckoned in numbers of cannon captured, increasingly was reckoned more in terms of enemy casualties. After the 1740s, major battles resulted in thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of casualties rather than a few hundred, or, at most, a few thousand. In the Duke of Marlborough's day, soldiers carried enough ammunition to sustain a firefight for about fifteen or twenty minutes at a very slow rate of fire. (165) By the 1770s and 1780s, well-supplied troopscould keep up a heavy volume of fire for hours, if necessary. Yet during this same interval, the effective range of weapons did not change. Infantry continued to open fire, typically, at a range of one hundred yards or less. Even with paper cartridges, a trained soldier of the early Napoleonic War period struggled to fire more than two roundsper minute, but he now had ten or twenty times as much ammunition ashis counterpart in the War of the Spanish Succession. After 1765, the introduction of better fuses also made the use of shells and antipersonnel rounds filled with grapeshot much more effective. (166)

Given the tactical situation, warfare became bloodier, more terrifying, and more chaotic. The increasing amount of lead flying across battlefields raised the odds against the individual soldier. The impact of technology, therefore, enhanced the importance of morale, a factappreciated by intellectual commanders. After the Seven Years' War, the leadership skills of junior officers began to be emphasized, as well as the development of esprit de corps, both of which could motivate soldiers in the face of increasing danger. (167) The logical answer to the problem of firepower was to move away from the old, heroic, individualistic organization of warfare toward a more professional system, in which officers and soldiers received formal training and employed scientific methods and increasingly technological weapons. It is here, in the period between 1748 and 1793, that we find the real Military Revolution. It is the crucial period when theories and new possibilities, rising out of the intellectual and economic ferment and achievements of the mid-eighteenth century, coalesced to produce genuinely significant increases in military power and fundamental changes in warfare and state formation. This period not only saw an increase in saltpeter exports from India, but also an increase in domestic European saltpeter production, mostly in France: Europe's own supply of nitrates rose from 1,500 tons to over 3,200 tons annually. The statistics for gunpowder use during the Seven Years' War, however, reveal in quite stark terms just how inadequate even this enhanced figure was. Military power in Europe had become dependent on Indian saltpeter.

The French Revolution and the outbreak of war between the revolutionaries and the rest of Europe in 1792 precipitated a crisis for the French military. Due to the arrest of Lavoisier, the work of the Essone arsenal was disrupted, and old-fashioned, emergency saltpeter collection measures instituted by the new government sustained productionrates only for the first three years of the conflict; after this, France's domestic nitrate industry collapsed, as it had during the Seven Years' War. (168) Needless to say, France was cut off from its supplementary supply of Indian nitrates. The fall of Holland to France in1795 and the subsequent British seizure of the VOC factories in India eliminated the Dutch saltpeter supply, while the war between England and Denmark in 1801, and the occupation of Serampore and Tranquebar, closed the Copenhagen market as well. (169) At the time of the collapse of French saltpeter production, Napoleon, then campaigning in Italy, wrote, "[flour field guns are nothing unless they have 1,000 rounds apiece." (170) Yet few French gunners ever saw a full caisson. Throughout the Italian campaign, Napoleon penned pleas to the civilian authorities, begging for more ammunition. He worked relentlessly to rationalize his army's supply system and eliminate waste, but he couldnot conjure saltpeter and gunpowder into being. (171) Even resortingto requisitioning saltpeter (and lead as well) in the occupied townsof Genoa and Tuscany, Napoleon could scarcely keep up with his army's expenditure of ammunition. (172) Such constraints led Napoleon to modify French tactics to account for the chronic ammunition shortage: Gunpowder was lavished on the artillery, which laid down terrifying, mass bombardments employing "grand batteries." French infantry, meanwhile, formed ponderous columns, narrow and deep (the brainchild of radical pre-war thinkers), expecting to literally push their way through the enemy's line at bayonet point. Screening firepower was providedby sharpshooters hovering on the edges of the advancing columns. In these ways, Napoleon exerted the power of mind over matter. His manner of warfare frightened foes, compelling them to break and become vulnerable to a massed cavalry charge. Against traditional continental armies, such morale-oriented tactics were successful during the period1806-1812, confirming the French in a set of tactical doctrines better suited to the age of pikes than to the age of firepower. (173) Fora number of reasons, however, these tactics did not succeed against the British Army.

British commanders used terrain to mask maneuvers and protect troops from bombardments while British soldiers learned to counter the French column with well-directed volleys, firing rapidly by ranks or byplatoons and sections. British artillery, unable to match the Frenchin a gunnery duel, focused on using improved antipersonnel rounds tocause mass casualties. Thin linear formations maximized firepower, and the "thin red line," not as fragile as it appeared, was rarely broken. (174) French output of musket powder peaked at around 679.5 tonsa year, which enabled the Vincennes arsenal to manufacture six million cartridges a month. (175) This was double the production rates of the 1790s, but it gave the French soldier only thirty rounds. At the same time, the British soldier often carried three times as much ammunition, with considerably more in reserve. Unlike French troops, redcoats trained regularly with live rounds, growing accustomed to the kick and noise of their muskets, slowly improving accuracy by learning the subtleties of sighting, elevation, and windage. (176) In India, where the EIC developed some of the largest powder mills in the world to supply its armies, Indian soldiers, or sipahis, also were put through similar live-fire drills. The first battalion of the Fifth MadrasNative Infantry, with a strength of 888 men, fired 35,796 rounds during routine drills in the period 1818-1819, and, during a typical month of peacetime garrison duty, the men spent four days practicing close-order marching, three days at musketry drill, and one day engaged in field maneuvers that entailed live-firing. (177) Britain's huge stocks of ammunition made this sort of continual training possible evenfor indigenous colonial troops. The EIC's saltpeter monopoly was only part of the equation. One of the other ingredients of gunpowder, sulfur, could be obtained in large quantities in Europe only from the volcanoes of southern Italy, or from Tenerife, all sources of supply that were blockaded or secured by the Royal Navy. (178) The strength of Britain's imperial defense system was, in part, an outgrowth of thesuccess of its worldwide naval power and commercial influence, whichwent hand-in-hand.

Britain's armaments industries expanded during the Napoleonic conflict as Britain deliberately pursued a strategy of capturing colonies, patrolling overseas trade routes, and commerce raiding, a strategy that had already benefited England during the Seven Years' War. (179)By 1808, Britain could "mass produce" weapons and ammunition, supplying anyone willing to oppose Napoleon, even obscure peasant rebels and bandits. The Royal Navy, from 1808 to 1811, delivered 336,000 muskets, 100,000 pistols, 348 cannon, and 60 million cartridges to Spanishguerrillas. (180) These were more arms and ammunition than the royalSpanish army had ever dreamed of procuring. The scale of British military aid should be measured alongside other mobilization efforts of the same period. Russia's preparation for Napoleon's invasion of 1812, for instance, yielded sixteen million cartridges. British industry,seemingly without effort, attained much higher production rates. Forinstance, in 1813, military aid to Russia, Prussia, and Sweden included 218 cannon, 124,000 muskets, and 18 million cartridges. One must remember that these shipments drew on the country's reserves and coincided with all-out efforts in Spain and with the War of 1812 between Britain and America. (181) The British Government fretted over such costly subsidies, but Britain's commercial and budding industrial basemet the demands. These numbers quietly herald Britain's ascendancy as the world's first global military superpower, a new status linked directly with control of the East India trade, and, in particular, with the Company's control of the "saltpeter mahals" of Bihar.

CONCLUSION--A CONVERGENCE OF FACTORS

Between 1793 and 1809, the EIC delivered 25,167.8 tons of saltpeter to the Ordnance Office and roughly an equivalent amount to private gunpowder mills in Britain. The terms of Act XXXI of George III (1791), chapter 42, required the Company to sell this saltpeter at less than a third of the cost of shipping it: As a result, the EIC lost 436,000 [pounds sterling] at a time when its Indian charges and debts were soaring. (182) The Directors relinquished with great relief their saltpeter monopoly in 1811. English merchants, displaced from the Atlantic by the War of 1812, invaded the Patna saltpeter business and delivered unprecedented amounts of saltpeter to London just in time for the final push against Napoleon, but the ultimate result was chaos atthe production end of the supply chain. In India, everyone from the nuniyas to the dadani merchants was accustomed to working for the Company, and they resisted the uncertainty of an open market, forcing the Company to resume its monopoly in 1813. (183) As the war in Europe entered its final stages, the Indian saltpeter trade adjusted to new conditions. The nuniyas demanded better pay, with limited success, while the Company found that the termination of the war in 1815 did notaffect prices to any significant degree. (184) However, demand declined: Between 1815 and 1830, approximately 15,252 tons of saltpeter passed through the port of Calcutta annually, approximately one-third of the amount shipped from Bengal during the war years. (185)

Eastern India remained an important source of saltpeter into the 1850s, and the saltpeter trade continued, in its quiet way, to bolsterBritish power by providing the government with a very effective means of diplomatic and military leverage. The area from which saltpeter supplies were obtained also expanded. The old saltpeter grounds of southern India were reopened in the districts of Salem, Coimbatore, Madurai, and Trichinopoly, as well as around Vellore, and in Kistna District, while production in northern India expanded northward. For the nuniyas, saltpeter making remained hard, polluting work, combined with low pay and debt slavery; for the Company, it remained an economically draining endeavor, despite the elimination of most foreign competition, for the penetration of lucrative new markets and the introduction of more powerful weapons requiring heavier powder charges. The United States, perhaps the largest new market for Indian saltpeter exports, was a voracious consumer of nitrates, since gunpowder was substituted for muscle in forestry, mining, and construction projects in the sparsely-settled western territories. American farmers were also interested in using nitrates as fertilizer. Aware that the saltpeter grounds of Bihar were in danger of being depleted, the Dupont firm initiated a program of research and development that eventually enabled the United States to become the second major Power (after Russia), to break free from the British monopoly of the saltpeter trade by developing "soda" powder for use as an industrial explosive. However, America's "independence" from Indian saltpeter did not really occur until long after the Civil War. At the beginning of the war, India's saltpeter exports tripled in value, reaching 600,000 [pounds sterling], andeventually rose to 900,000 [pounds sterling] before the end of the conflict. (186)

A significant number of people continued to be employed digging "salt earth" in Bihar, but after the abolition of the EIC's trading operations, control of the trade fell entirely into the hands of Indian contractors. This is not surprising, since, as Christopher Bayly has shown, the financing of the Company's saltpeter business already was in the hands of the Hindustani banking houses of Patna and Banaras. (187) Production levels remained high, but the marketing of saltpeter had to adapt as military technology changed due to the introduction of chemical explosives. The opening of the nitrate grounds of Peru in the 1830s and 1840s, largely with British capital, also affected India's saltpeter industry by reducing metropolitan investment. Peru exported nitrates worth $1,483,820 in 1859, with Britain accounting for $802,023 of this sum. Much of the balance, in fact, was purchased by France and Germany, once major secondary consumers of Indian saltpeter. Patna's saltpeter traders could compete with Peruvian nitrates onlywith difficulty. (188) The United States, however, continued to be amajor client of the Indian saltpeter trade, its purchases surpassingthose of Britain itself by the end of the nineteenth century. A study of the saltpeter industry by the Geological Survey of India in 1904-1905 found that in north India alone, 399 small refineries exported 19,438.8 tons of nitrates annually. Some 281 of these kothis were situated in Bihar, employing 50,469 workers and earning 4.1 million rupees annually. Far from vanishing from the scene, the Indian saltpeter trade found niche markets, although nitrates exported from India now were used primarily for agricultural and industrial purposes, or for supplying fireworks makers. (189) It was not Chilean sodium nitrate, but the development of the Haber-Bosch process in Germany after 1909 (and especially after the start of the First World War) that finally ended India's saltpeter industry. Nevertheless, the saltpeter business limped through the next decade, receiving a slight boost due to theoutbreak of World War I, and was the subject of two more in-depth government surveys. (190) By the 1920s, Chile's saltpeter was obsolete as well. (191)

As we have seen, the East India Companies' ability to assemble large cargoes of inexpensive saltpeter in India and ship them to Europe enabled the production of the ammunition stocks that made the Military Revolution possible. The British used the military power gained at this time to impose their will in Europe and expand their Empire in South Asia and elsewhere. However, not everything depended on the saltpeter trade. One must avoid the trap of technological determinism. The complex developments discussed in this article were the result of multifaceted causes, and here I offer only a partial explanation. The most important military powers of Early Modern Europe either claimed a share of the Indian saltpeter trade, or, like Russia, developed efficient state-controlled domestic nitrate industries. The military power of Britain, Holland, and France, however, rested more on logistical strength, on an ability to raise and supply troops and fleets that reflected skill in international finance, managerial expertise, and technical talents. These factors were key underpinnings of the capitalist system and the modern, rational, bureaucratic state. In the case of Britain's control over the Indian saltpeter trade, a convergence occurred of all the necessary factors that included a favorable chronology of socioeconomic and political developments. The rise of a capitalist economy in Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, thegradual subordination of the mercantilist EIC to the state, the culmination of the Scientific and Military Revolutions, the beginnings ofthe Industrial Revolution, and the adoption of a long-term global strategy by the British Government during the long reign of King GeorgeIII established the context in which the saltpeter trade became an important but unappreciated prop of British power.

(1.) This article presents research conducted in 1995-1997, fundedin part by the History Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The original version of this article first was presented at theConference on Indian Military History at Wolfson College, Cambridge University, in Britain, in the summer of 1997, under my former name, James W. Hoover. Due to the subsequent publication of considerably more research, that article has been substantially revised, although the essential thesis has remained unaltered.

(2.) For the changing tonnage of Indiamen, see Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1993), 201. During the period 1700-1710, some 461 European voyages to and from the Indian Ocean were completed. Due to the expansion of East India fleets, this means that some 5,000 voyages may have beenmade during the eighteenth century alone. For an estimate of shipping in the seventeenth century, see R. J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seve nteenth Century (Armonk, NY: Sharpe,2002), 200. Barendse suggests that at the end of the seventeenth century, Europe was receiving between fourteen and eighteen ships from India annually, but these did not include the pirate vessels and "interlopers" plying the Indian Ocean at that time. For details regarding East India Company shipping, especially during the eighteenth century, see Jean Sutton, Lords of the East: The East India Company and Its Ships (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1981). Throughout this article,contemporary weights will be given in their modern metric equivalent, in particular tons; in order to avoid confusion, "ton" will be reserved for measuring a ship's cargo-carrying area, following the Early Modern usage.

(4.) R. Balasubramaniam, "Saltpetre Manufacture and Marketing in Medieval India," Indian Journal of History of Science 4, 2005, 663-72.

(5.) Barendse, Arabian Seas, 7-8, 141-42.

(6.) See the introduction to Brenda J. Buchanan, ed., Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: A Technological History (Aldershot: Ashgate,2005).

(7.) Kumkum Chatterjee, "Trade and Darbar Politics in the Bengal Subah, 1733-1757," Modern Asian Studies 2, 1992, 233-73; Narayan Prasad Singh, The East India Company's Monopoly Industries in Bihar: With Particular Reference to Saltpetre and Opium, 1773-1833 (Muzaffarpur: Sarvodaya Vangmaya, 1980); Jagdish Narayan Sarkar, "The Organization of the Saltpetre Industry of India in the Seventeenth Century," Indian Historical Quarterly (December 1938); and, by the same author, "Administrative Interference in the Saltpetre Trade of India in the Seventeenth Century," Journal of Indian History 3, 1941, 31-48.

(8.) See for example, Christopher A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Tapan Raychaudhuri,Jan Company in Coromandel, 1605-1690: A Study in the Interrelations of European Commerce and Traditional Economies ('s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1962).

(10.) For two very recent works that come close to appreciating the full significance of the saltpeter trade, see Stephen R. Brown, A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: T. Dunne Books, 2005), 25-50, and Brenda J. Buchanan, "Saltpetre: A Commodity of Empire," in Gunpowder, ed. Buchanan,67-90.

(11.) Robert Heron, Elements of Chemistry: Comprehending all of the Most Important Facts and Principles in the Works of Fourcroy and Chaptal (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800), 524-25. For a good description of saltpeter making in India, see George Watt, The Commercial Products of India (London: John Murray, 1908), 972-75.

(12.) For an overview of ancient and medieval uses of saltpeter, especially in Asia, see Arun Kumar Biswas, "Epic of Saltpeter to Gunpowder," Indian Journal of History of Science 4, 2005, 539-71.

(13.) For the use of gunpowder in the African slave trade, see R. A. Kea, "Firearms and Warfare on the Gold and Slave Coasts from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries," The Journal of African History2, 1971, 185-213.

(15.) The enormous productivity of the Bihar saltpeter mahals, as they were called, can be attributed to the relatively high density ofpopulation and livestock that had existed in the area since the timeof the Buddha. The abundance of plant life that sprang up with the rains and decayed during the hot weather each year and the unvarying warm weather contributed to conditions in which decaying organic materials were converted readily and naturally into nitrates.

(16.) Wang Ling, "On the Invention and Use of Gunpowder and Firearms in China," Isis 3-4, 1947, 160-78.

(17.) In 1609, the Dutch Republic had sent warships into the Baltic to procure consignments of approximately 50 tons of saltpeter from Danzig (Gdansk), where Dutch diplomats arranged the exportation. Manyprivate traders in Amsterdam also were engaged in the Danzig saltpeter trade; thus, even before the VOC began to explore the Indian nitrate market, Holland already possessed a body of merchants well-informed about the product, with distribution networks extending throughout Europe. See Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis (hereafter ING), Resolution Staten-Generaal, 22 June 1609, 2. Cited at http:// www.inghist.nl/retroboeken/statengeneraal/ . See further Violet Barbour, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the 17th Century (Ann Arbor, MI: U. of Michigan P., 1950), 171. As the political conditions in the Baltic region worsened, the VOC was asked to procure saltpeter from India. By 1628, large regular shipments were reported as arriving from India "and elsewhere," but initially most of this was used to build up the reserves of the Dutch Republic. ING, Resolutien Staten-Generaal, 27 June 1628,5. Cited at http://www.inghist.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/BesluitenStaten-generaal1626-1651/ silva/sg/resoluties/1628/06/27/resoluties/05.

(18.) Iqtidar Alam Khan, "Early Use of Cannon and Musket in India:A.D. 1442-1526," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 2, 1981, 146-64.

(20.) Vengalil A. Janaki, The Commerce of Cambay from the EarliestPeriod to the Nineteenth Century (Baroda: Department of Geography, Maharaja Sayajirao University, 1980), 36.

(21.) For a comprehensive analysis of cargoes shipped to Europe bythe Portuguese during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Niels Steensgard, Carracks, Caravels and Companies: The Structural Crisis in the European-Asian Trade in the Seventeenth Century (Kopenhaven: Studentlitteratur, 1972), 166-68.

(32.) Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630-1720 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985), 35-36.

(33.) Barendse, Arabian Seas, 317.

(34.) The idea of the "gunpowder empire" is derived from Soviet historians' attempts to understand the Safavid Empire in a Marxist framework in the 1930s. For the first use of the term to explain the Mughals, see Marshal G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, III: Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago P., 1974). According to Hodgson, the Mughals, Safavids, Ottomans, and Habsburgs all represented "gunpowder empires," which he defined as states that monopolized firepower in an effort to demilitarize local elites. Such a formulation cannot be applied to Mughal India, where elites remained well armed and capable of defying the state.

(36.) Jauhar, Tazkiratu-l Waki'at, trans. Major Stewart, in The History of India, As Told by Its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period,vol. 4, ed. Sir H. M. Eliot and John Dowson (London: Trubner Co., 1867-1877), 136-49. In an effort to maintain his "monopoly" on firearmsexpertise, Rumi Khan routinely severed the hands of every enemy gunner captured by his troops. Humayun ordered him to desist after he cutoff the hands of 300 men after the fall of Chunar.

(43.) Facing a chronic shortage of saltpeter, the English crown had instituted forced saltpeter collections by authorized agents in 1588. The House of Commons opposed these measures, as did most magistrates.

(44.) William H. Hart, A Short Account of the Early Manufacture ofGunpowder in England (London: W. H. Elkins, 1855), 9-11; Josiah Child, A Discourse about Trade (London: A. Sowle, 1690). At this time, other Englishmen also were seeking saltpeter abroad (see Philippe De Cosse-Brissac, "Robert Blake and the Barbary Company, 1636-1641," African Affairs 190, 1949, 25-37).

(47.) Batavia Dagh-Register, 1631-1634, 351 (12 July 1634). The source uses as its measure of weight the maund or man, which varied from one region of India to another. Here and elsewhere in this article,in determining the metric equivalent of the maund, I have attempted to discern which type of maund was used in the original source; however, this is not always clear, especially since the East India companies did not always use standardized weights or measures. The maund used by the VOC and French equaled approximately 27.18 kg, while that wewill encounter later, used by the nuniyas around Patna, ranged from 31.71 to 38.5 kg. The English "factory maund" weighed 43.94 kg. The modern Indian standard for the maund is 37.3 kg. For England's domestic saltpeter production, see John U. Nef, "A Comparison of Industrial Growth in France and England from 1540 to 1640, III," The Journal of Political Economy 5, 1936, 643-66. Production of artificial saltpeterin England reached 285.3 tons and remained at that level from 1589 until 1636. The Commissioners of the Navy informed the Company of London Merchants about the Dutch saltpeter trade from India in 1624, and in 1630, the EIC Directors asked the factors in India to send home atleast 25 tons per ship (see K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600-1640 [London: Frank Cass & Co., 1965], 188).

(50.) BL/OIOC, Thomas Kerridge and Council at Surat to the Company, 4 January 1628, Original Correspondence, No. 1264.

(51.) Although new to the Europeans, the saltpeter works near Ahmadabad had been worked for a long time. A saltpeter-producing area around Jhalabarha is mentioned by Abu al-Fazal (see Abu-I Fazl [Abu al-Fazal], Akbarnama, vol. 2, 252).

(52.) BL/OIOC, Nathaniel Mountney, etc., at Ahmadabad to Presidentand Council, Surat, 28 March 1628, Factory Records, Surat, 102: 577;BL/OIOC, Nathaniel Mountney at Ahmadabad to President and Council, Surat, 6 January 1628, Factory Records, Surat, 102: 490; BL/OIOC, William Fremlen and John Spiller, Thatta, to President and Council, Surat, 18 December 1635, Old Correspondence, No. 1549; BI/OIOC, Surat Council to the Company, 4 January 1639, Original Correspondence, No. 1656; BI/OIOC, President Wylde and the Surat Council to the Company, 27 April 1629, Original Correspondence, No. 1292.

(60.) A. Olearius, The voyages and travells of the ambassadors sent by Frederick, Duke of Holstein, to the Great Duke of Muscovy and the King of Persia ... Whereto are added the Travels of John Albert de Mandelslo (a gentleman belonging to the embassy) from Persia into theEast-Indies, trans. John Davies (London: John Starkey and Thomas Basset, 1669), 66-67. For a brief account of Mandelslo's travels in India, see Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 3 (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1998), 667. Mandelslo stayedat the English factory in Surat during the rains and traveled inlandtoward Agra in October and November, the main saltpeter-production season in northwestern India.

(61.) George A. Grierson, Bihar Peasant Life, Being a Discursive Catalogue of the Surroundings of the People of that Province (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1885), 76-77. This renders an especially enlightening document, a petition sent by a group of nuniyas to British officials in 1814, which tells us much about the industry from theworkers' point of view.

(62.) Many sources refer to the use of copper boilers, but in Bengal, all copper had to be imported from Japan, and consequently such high-quality equipment was beyond the reach of most nuniyas.

(63.) Prakash, Dutch, 59. In both Persian and Hindustani, shora isthe word most commonly used for saltpeter. For a contemporary description of the saltpeter-production process in seventeenth century Bihar, see National Archief, The Hague, 1.04.02, No. 1454, Bengalen, ft. 746-81 (Adriaen van Ommen and Pieter Vrolijkhardt, Patna, 30 June 1688); Wouter Schouten, Oost-Indische Reys-Beschrijving, vol. 3 (Amsterdam: van Meurs and van Someren, 1677), 119; J. Stevenson, "On the Manufacture of Saltpeter as Practiced by the Natives of Tirhut," Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2 (1833): 23-27. Forthe use of shora in Indian Persian, see Francis Gladwin, The PersianMoonshee, 3d ed., vol. 2 (Calcutta: Chronicle Press, 1800), 135. A detailed account of the saltpeter mahals may be found in R. MontgomeryMartin, The History, Antiquities, Topography, and Statistics of Eastern India, vol. 2 (London: W.H. Allen, 1838), 280; also see Sarkar, "The Organization," 31-48.

(64.) E. M. Jacobs, Merchant in Asia: The Trade of the Dutch East India Company during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2006), 123.

(65.) For an excellent discussion of the role of dadani merchants,or brokers, in Indian trade, see M. N. Pearson, "Brokers in Western Indian Port Cities: Their Role in Servicing Foreign Merchants," Modern Asian Studies 3, 1988, 455-72.

(66.) Chatterjee, "Trade." One flaw in Chatterjee's argument, however, is her characterization of the Patna saltpeter trade as a "boom"commerce dependent on European traders. To be sure, the major merchant houses relied upon the East India trade for their great fortunes, but as we have seen, Patna already was a major saltpeter market geared toward meeting a significant level of domestic demand. Also see Kumkum Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics and Society in Early Modern India: 1730-1820 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 26-27.

(67.) Charles Fawcett, The English Factories in India: The EasternCoast and Bay of Bengal, New Series, 1678-1684, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 235. One thousand rupees was a considerable sum, roughly equal to about 100 [pounds sterling] in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English currency, or about five times the annual wage of a Dutch artisan (such as a VOC sailmaker) at the time.

(68.) Prakash, Dutch, 108-10.

(69.) Najaf Haider, "Precious Metal Flows and Currency Circulationin the Mughal Empire," Journal of the Economic and Social History ofthe Orient 39.3 (1996): 298-364. During the period 1657-1661, the European companies imported 1.51 metric tons of silver into Bengal annually, but during the period 1668-1672, the annual imports rose to 13.95 metric tons. Since prices remained stable across both periods, theincrease is attributed entirely to an expanding volume of trade.

(70.) Prakash, Dutch, 152. Also see Jacobs, Merchant, 124.

(71.) Prakash, Dutch, 59-60; K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World ofAsia and the East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 337-38; N. N. Raye, The Annals of the Early English Settlement in Bihar (Calcutta: Kama Book Depot, 1927), 29-98.

(72.) Jacobs, Merchant in Asia, 124. Frequently, for one reason oranother, the VOC failed to export that much saltpeter.

(73.) Levon Khachikian, "The Journal of the Merchant Hovhannes Joughayetsi," Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 8.3 (1966): 153-86.

(74.) Mesrovb Jacob Seth, Armenians in India, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day: A Work of Original Research (Calcutta: Mesrovb Jacob Seth, 1937), 284.

(75.) Graham Harris, Treasure and Intrigue: The Legacy of Captain Kidd (Toronto: Dundirn Press, 2002), 133-34. The vessel was declared a "French" prize because a French sailor happened to be aboard.

(77.) Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Maritime India in the Seventeenth Century (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1994), 169. There certainly was some demand for saltpeter in Asian markets outside India. In the 1750s, the VOC usually sold about 260,000 guilders' worth of nitrates to Asian merchants. See Ryuto Shimada, The Intra-Asian Trade in Japanese Copper by the Dutch East India Company during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden:Brill, 2006), 118. It seems more likely to me that instead of "collapsing," this trade was taken over by the VOC and by European country traders.

(78.) Jacobs, Merchant in Asia, 126.

(79.) Prakash, Dutch, 185-86, 200, 220.

(80.) Jacobs, Merchant in Asia, 124, 126. The committees charged with provisioning the Dutch military purchased saltpeter from the VOC on contract and did not have to buy nitrates at auction.

(81.) Confusion regarding the merging of the two companies, after their long and bitter rivalry, is perhaps understandable, but the diplomatic resolution of this "misunderstanding" took longer than necessary.

(82.) C. R. Wilson, The Early Annals of the English in Bengal: TheBengal Public Consultations for the First Half of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2.2 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1911), 238, 245-46.

(84.) Raye, English Settlement in Bihar, 98-108. For an alternative view of the use of European troops to guard saltpeter barges, see Chatterjee, "Trade and Darbar Politics," 233-73. Cbatterjee's suggestion that European soldiers wantonly attacked toll officials and othershas to be viewed in the context of their being frequently fired uponfrom the shore, often by provincial officials.

(85.) Wilson, English in Bengal 2.1, lix.

(86.) Ibid., 2.1, lxi-lxiii.

(87.) A year-by-year table of East India Company saltpeter exportsfrom Bengal, from 1698 to 1760, may be found in Bal Krishna, Commercial Relations between India and England, 1601-1757 (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1924), 307-8.

(88.) Marc Vigil, Dupleix (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 114-27.

(89.) Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 257. Ironically, the period of VOC prominence in the saltpeter trade coincided witha gradual reduction in Dutch shipping after 1740, which has been explained as symptomatic of a general contraction of the VOC's trade (see Jacobs, Merchant in Asia, 124).

(90.) Sushil Chaudhuri, "Merchants, Companies and Rulers in Bengalin the Eighteenth Century," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 31, 1988, 90-103; Kalikinkar K. Datta, The Dutch in Bengal and Bihar, 1740-1825 A.D. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968), 6.

(91.) Chatterjee, "Trade," 233-73. For a short overview of KhwajahWajid's antecedents and career, see Andrew Godley, "Migration of Entrepreneurs," in The Oxford Handbook of Entrepreneurship, ed. Mark Casson et al. (London: Oxford University Press, 2006), 601-10.

(95.) For the impact of British military expansion on the VOC at this time, see Jacobs, Merchant in Asia, 121. The defeat of the Dutch expedition at Bedara coincided, more or less, with the English occupation of Surat. The two events together, combined with the ascendancy of the East India Company on the Coromandel Coast and the earlier defeat of the VOC by the Raja of Travancore, led to a drastic reduction in Dutch operations on the Indian mainland.

(99.) Johan Splinter Stavornius, Voyages to the East-Indies; by the Late John Splinter Stavorinus, Esq., Rear-Admiral in the Service ofthe States-General, 3 vols., vol. 1 (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1798), 479, 526-27. The value of the Dutch gold imports was between 350,000 [pounds sterling] and 450,000 [pounds sterling]. Annually, the EIC permitted the VOC to purchase 1,600 tons of saltpeter at cost andadditional nitrates at auction on the open market, if so desired. This sort of secure trade was attractive to the VOC, which could not compete with English private traders in the silk and opium trades during the corrupt circumstances of the 1760s. Indeed, VOC trade in Bengaldeclined from 4 to 1.5 million guilders between 1757 and 1770, but, on the positive side, the English private traders laundered their profits in the Dutch settlements, eventually enabling the VOC to curtailcostly gold and silver imports (see Jacobs, Merchant in Asia, 139).

(100.) Larry Neal, "The Dutch and English East India Companies Compared: Evidence from the Stock and Foreign Exchange Markets," in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350-1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 208.

(101.) Imperial Record Department, Calendar of Persian Correspondence, vol. 8, 1788-1789 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1911), Nos. 661, 829, 1564 (correspondence between the Governor-General-in-Council at Fort William and Nawab Mubarak-ud-Daulah). The allotment for the Raja of Banaras, interestingly, was comparable to the normal peacetime saltpeter requirements of all of the American colonies at roughly the same time. Indubitably, much of the Raja's saltpeter allowance was used for making fireworks.

(102.) Awadh, however, managed to maintain a minor trade in cloth and saltpeter with Central India, which paid for such imports with iron ore. The primary markets of this trade were Banaras and Mirzapur (see Bayly, Rulers, 159).

(105.) These losses refer only to the sale of the Company's saltpeter shipments. Exactly how much the Company was earning selling saltpeter to the Dutch, French, and Danes is at the same time unclear. Thesalt monopoly, closely connected with the saltpeter monopoly, rapidly became an extremely lucrative source of revenue for the Company.

(107.) By 1805, annual sales of saltpeter to China had risen to 287,144 rupees, and following the Napoleonic Wars, China's demand for saltpeter crested at 294.3 tons (1824-1825); in 1832-1833, the Canton nitrate market collapsed, however, with trade being disrupted furtherby the subsequent Opium Wars (see House of Commons, Report from the Select Committee on Trade with China, 1840, 202-3).

(108.) For example, see The Asiatic Register: Or, A View of the History of Hindustan, and of the Politics, Commerce, and Literature of Asia, for the Year 1799, vol. 2 (London: J. Debrett, 1800), 106-7. For a reference to saltpeter production in "all villages" of Awadh, seeBayly, Rulers, 56.

(110.) For a detailed study of the gunpowder supply system in Britain, see Jenny West, The Supply of Gunpowder to the Ordnance Office in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (London: University of London, 1986), and Jenny West, Gunpowder, Government and War in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (London: Royal Historical Society, 1991). These works contain lists of British gunpowder mills and their owners, which should be compared with the lists of members of the Court of Directors during the same period. The overlap among these sets of lists is astonishing.

(111.) Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560-1660 (Belfast: Queen's College, 1954); Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For discussions of all aspects of the Military Revolution concept, see Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995).

(115.) Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (New York: Kodansha International, 1994), 25.

(116.) George Bryan Souza, The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea, 1630-1754 (Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 2004), 75-76; Om Prakash, European Commercial Expansion in Early Modern Asia (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1997), 73. Also seeBarendse, Arabian Seas, 359, regarding the Portuguese shipment to the Philippines of saltpeter purchased at Madras in the 1670s.

(118.) Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid, Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (Madison, WI: U. of Wisconsin P., 2006), 107-09. Gunpowder technology had come to Vietnam in the fourteenth century, and the Vietnamese had introduced some of their own innovations in the use of firearms.

(119.) Jacobs, Merchant in Asia, 119.

(120.) Nordin Hussin, Trade and Society in the Straits of Melaka: Dutch Melaka and English Penang, 1780-1830 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 39-40.

(121.) John Walker, Elements of Geography and of Natural and CivilHistory, 3d ed. (Dublin: Thomas Morton Bates, 1796), 491. Saltpeter had been used for ritual purposes in Iranian "fire temples" since antiquity, but production had been on a very small scale.

(123.) Gabor Agoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 160.

(124.) Institut d'Egypte (1798-1801), Memoirs Relative to Egypt, Written in that Country during the Campaigns of General Bonparate in the Years 1798 and 1799, by the Learned and Scientific Men Who Accompanied the French Expedition (Edinburgh: E. Balfour, 1800), 42-43.

(127.) ING, Resolutien Staten-Generaal (6 November 1629), 8. Leidecker was warned, however, to deliver the nitrates only to the partiesstipulated in his request; it is clear, from the tenor of their responses to merchants' requests, that the States-General kept a very close watch over the distribution of saltpeter re-exports.

(129.) For a description of artificial saltpeter making in Spain, see John Talbot Dillon, Travels through Spain: With a View to Illustrate the Natural History and Physical Geography of that Kingdom, 2d ed. (London: R. Baldwin, 1781), 33-46.

(130.) Clement Cruttwell, The New Universal Gazetteer, or, Geographical Dictionary: Containing a Description of all the Empires, Kingdoms... in the Known World (Dublin: John Stockdale, 1800), 141.

(131.) Antonio C. Quintela, Joao Lugs Cardoso, and Jose Manuel de Mascarenhas, "The Barcarena Gunpowder Factory: Its History and Technological Evolution between the Seventeenth and Twentieth Centuries," in Gunpowder, ed. Buchanan, 123-41.

(132.) Alan R. Williams, "The Production of Saltpetre in the Middle Ages," Ambix 22, 1975, 125-33; Surirey de Saint Remy, "The Manufacture of Gunpowder in France (1702): Part I, Saltpetre, Sulphur, and Charcoal," trans. D. H. Roberts, Journal of the Ordnance Society 5, 1993, 47-55. Also see Thomas Kaiserfeld, "Chemistry in the War Machine: Saltpeter Production in 18th Century Sweden," in The Heirs of Archimedes: Technology, Science and Warfare, 1550-1800, ed. Brett Steele (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 275-92.

(136.) W. G. Heeres et al., From Dunkirk to Danzig: Shipping and Trade in the North Sea and the Baltic, 1350-1850 (Hilversnm: Verloren Publishers, 1988), 168. In the 1630s, saltpeter exports from Danzig hovered around 103 tons. For the heavy Danish tolls, see Steve Murdochand Andrew MacKillop, Fighting for Identity: The Scottish Military Experience, c. 1550-1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 259. Taxes on war materials passing through the Danish-held Sound ran as high as 78 percent, although these restrictions might be relaxed to aid an ally.

(138.) John Lind, Letters Concerning the Present State of Poland, second ed. (London: T. Payne, 1773), 384; Carter, Trade and Urban Development, 221; Gershon Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 34.

(139.) Johann Georg Zimmermann, Select Views of the Life, Reign, and Character of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, trans. Major Neuman (Dublin: R. Cross et al., 1792), 24.

(140.) John Vint, A Concise System of Modern Geography, or, a Description of the Terraqueous Globe, Exhibiting a Distinct View of All Nations, 2 vols. (Newcastle on Tyne: K. Anderson, 1800-1808), 234.

(141.) William Guthrie, A New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar; and Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World (London: C. Dilly, 1800), 545; Cruttwell, New Universal Gazetteer, 24.

(142.) John Beckmann, A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins, 4th ed., vol. 2, trans. William Johnston (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846). The original German version was published between 1783 and 1805.

(143.) John Thomas James, Journal of a Tour in Germany, Sweden, Russia, and Poland in 1813 and 1814 (London: John Murray, 1819), 219.

(144.) M. S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618-1789 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1998), 19-20.

(145.) ING, Resolutien Staten-Generaal (22 June 1609), 2. The States-General was so impressed by Russia's saltpeter production at this time that it had begun seeking out Dutch merchants with in-depth knowledge of the country's nitrate industry.

(146.) William Tooke, View of the Russian Empire, during the Reignof Catharine the Second, and to the Close of the Eighteenth Century (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800), 362-63,420; Jean-Henri Castera, The Life of Catharine II, Empress of Russia (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800), 19.

(152.) West, Gunpowder, 163, 212, 224-27. For a discussion of the dearth of saltpeter and gunpowder in the American colonies in the 1770s, see Neil L. York, "Clandestine Aid and the American RevolutionaryWar Effort: A Re-Examination," Military Affairs 1, 1979, 26-30.

(153.) British Library, Add. MS. No. 38393, "Minutes of the Committee of Trade, 9 January to 31 March 1791," 16. There were fourteen licensed private gunpowder mills in Britain in 1791, and according to their records, nine-tenths of their production was exported, accounting for a considerable portion of the kingdom's income from overseas trade.

(154.) The Danes had begun to export saltpeter from the CoromandelCoast in the 1630s. See Om Prakash, European Commercial Expansion, 187. The Danish share of the Patna saltpeter trade was approximately 350 tons annually, most of which was sold to the German principalities(see Sinha, Comprehensive History of Bihar, 48).

(155.) Christopher Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1974), 132-33; Hew Strachan, European Armies and the Conduct of War (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 8; Russell Frank Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2004), 267.

(156.) For a detailed study of the French response to the British saltpeter monopoly, see Robert P. Multhauf, The French Crash Program for Saltpeter Production, 1776-1794 (New York: Society for the History of Technology, 1971).

(158.) To put Lavoisier's accomplishment into perspective, French saltpeter production for 1784 was about 350 tons less than the usual VOC exports from Bengal during the same period (see Jacobs, Merchant in Asia, 127). VOC exports for 1786-1787 were abnormally large at 2,500 tons, reflecting the shipment of stockpiles built up but not delivered at the time of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War.

(160.) Poirier, Lavoisier, 118,223. French ballistics tests conducted in 1778 also suggested that the new French gunpowder supplies were better than those of the British Ordnance Office. By increasing theamount of saltpeter to 76 percent of the weight of a charge, ranges had been improved, and probably striking force as well.

(162.) Armstrong Starkey, War in the Age of the Enlightenment, 1700-1789 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 50.

(163.) Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology and Tactics (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997). Also see Weigley, Age of Battles, 270, who locates the main work on ballistics in the first half of the eighteenth century.

(164.) Starkey, War, 45.

(165.) David G. Chandler, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough, 2d ed. (New York: Sarpedon, 1995). Despite the dearth of ammunition, Chandler argues that the British Army embraced firepower tactics wholeheartedly under Marlborough. I disagree, for, although the theory of firepower received much attention, technology and logistical support had yet to catch up, and infantry training books continued to emphasize close-order drill and use of the bayonet in addition to musketry.

(166.) Weigley, Age of Battles, 272.

(167.) Rory Muir, Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1998).

(169.) By overrunning Holland, the French not only took control ofthe VOC saltpeter stocks, but also blocked the Rhine, via which the German armies were importing Dutch and Danish gunpowder. See Great Britain, Parliament, An Impartial Report of the Debates in the Two Houses of Parliament, in the Year 1795, Including Copies of All State Papers, Treaties, Conventions, etc., ed. William Woodfall (London: T. Chapman, 1795), 267. Later British efforts to capture the mouth of the Rhine had much to do with trying to reopen the river as an Allied supply route.

(171.) Napoleon to Citizen Petiet, Councillor of State at Milan, 10 June 1800, in Letters, vol. 1, 462-63.

(172.) The History of the Campaign of 1796 in Germany and Italy, Translated from the French, vol. 4 (London: T. Cadell, 1800-1801), 174. The people "ruined" by these requisitions probably were cloth dyers, metal workers, and other petty craftsmen who kept stocks of saltpeter on hand for use in various industrial processes. Under the terms of a temporary truce, the French were required by the Austrians to compensate individuals for saltpeter confiscations.

(182.) William Milburn, Oriental Commerce, vol. 1 (London: Black, Parry, 1813). Act XXXV of Charles II (5 July 1683) had required the Company of London Merchants to deliver 1,050 tons of saltpeter to the Crown at 38 [pounds sterling] per ton. Act X of William of Orange (5 September 1698), pledged the Crown to purchase 500 tons of saltpeter,at cost, in India, plus whatever duties, handling costs, and freightcharges might apply. By the 1780s, the price paid by the Crown for saltpeter had risen only to 45 [pounds sterling] 10s per hundredweight(50.84 kg) during peacetime and 53 [pounds sterling] 10s during wartime (see British Library, Add. MS., No. 38393, "Minutes of the Committee of Trade, 9 January to 31 March 1791," 12-16, 44-46). For additional anecdotal information regarding the Company's saltpeter trade at this time, see H.V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756-1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2006), 48, 123, 238-39; Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 2006), 140, 250, 252.

(188.) "Statistics of American States. No. 4. Republic of Peru," Journal of the American Geographic and Statistical Society 1.4 (1859):114-16.

(189.) Watt, Commercial Products, 972-75.

(190.) John Walter Leather and Jatindra Nath Mukerji, The Indian Saltpetre Industry (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1911); Claud Mackenzie Hutchinson, Saltpetre: Its Origin and Extraction in India (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1917). By World War I, however, Chilean nitrates were more central to the European armaments industry than Indian saltpeter, and one of the first major naval battles of the war was fought over access to the Chilean mines.

(191.) In the Haber-Bosch process, synthetic saltpeter was manufactured by obtaining ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen. The methods were efficient and made use of raw materials readily available in Europeand other Western countries.

James W. Frey is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, specializing in South Asian and World History. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.His research interests include South Asian history and culture, the history of magic in South Asia, and India during the colonial period.He is the author of "The Sepoy Speaks: Discerning the Significance of the Vellore Mutiny," in Mutiny at the Margins, edited by Crispin Bates et al. (New Delhi: Sage, forthcoming 2009) and Men without Hats: Dialogue, Discipline and Discontent in the Madras Army (New Delhi: Manohar, 2007).